for the poets

merry christmas/happy new year/&welcome. from my mind to yours.

poems for you, stranger

how vulnerable it is to share words you strung together. words you threaded and stitched and sewed so intently with nothing but your own mind. words that came so quickly to you at 2:27am that you jerked awake because your brain was screaming at you to WRITE THEM DOWN before sleep steals them again.

I feel like a child, scribbling away at the kitchen table. a child who let childhood pass because of a desperation to turn to their mother with something good enough to show. but as time stretches on, the product must be better. greater. more innovative. more impressive.

it feels as though…

each time I think I have something, something that just might be worth a few silent seconds of someone else’s time, I come across a better something.

I read. incessantly. Dickens, Milton, Plath, Whitman, Eliot, Keats, Poe, Oliver.

it is easy to decide you aren’t good enough. to reach and reach and reach higher. but then one day—

you look up and realize that is all you have done. reached.

so this is me. no longer reaching, just unapologetically still. this is what I have to offer you, stranger. I hope it is worth your gaze. but most of all, I hope it helps you to stop reaching too.

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Romeo & Juliet

I feel the ghost of you

Here on this rooftop

Dancing with me

Above the city lights

Sitting on this ledge with me

Phantom arm around my shoulders

Until I muster up the courage

To jump.

and I know you are waiting for me, dear

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my imagination is far greater than this world.

so large, it floods into places that only exist

in my mind.

it leaks into new worlds,

seeping into new dimensions,

spreading

never

ceasing.

attempting to satisfy an insatiable desire for what cannot be,

what never was.

why was I made this way?

why am I dissatisfied with this life?

I have what I need,

I wish to be,

satiable.

I feel selfish that I am not.

I want to grow up

and grow out

of this

but do I?

the cost,

is it worth it?

to lose my imagination,

to become satiable,

I would have to lose a part of myself.

and I wonder,

who will I become?

because without the worlds I discover

in my head,

without the adventures I take

in my dreams,

what will fill that room

in my head?

of lives I have lived

through words on pages,

people I have loved

existing only there,

in

my

head.

Imagination.

it is my curse,

but I would never trade it nor lose it because

it is my favorite piece of myself.

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A Haiku For My Family

how dear they love me

how sweetly they give to me

me, of little thanks

________________________________

i want to live alone

in a cozy home

in the snowy mountains.

i will bake cinnamon rolls

and

light tall candles on the kitchen table by the window.

i will watch the wax drip down, down..

as the light flickers

exposing the shadows that hide in the corners of the room.

until a candle tips.

a flame runs up, up, up the curtain and—

devours the wooden walls

wooden ceilings

wooden floors

wooden stairs

a house built to fall.

my cozy alone home

burned to the ground.

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