Poetry needs me, like I bleed it, like I gasp for it when its fist hits my gut and reminds me as I curl over.

Like I spit it into the floor, like I flatten, like my coffin is buried in it.

Poetry needs me like the dirt needs the corpse.

I remember now
how I asked for death and
years fell away from me and
now I taste poetry as I grit the dirt in my palms.

I taste the poetry trickling down from tightly clenched teeth,
I ******* reluctance.

I taste the texture of my old ways,
arms crossed to what it could teach me.

They are open now and as the remembered echo of a sweet friend comes rumbling through my ears, I know it is me. I know that I am the choir of sirens in the swamp. I know that poetry is become me and I am nothing without it, it is something without me.

There are pages of the old heralds of poetry basted to the firmament, glowing as celestial bodies tormented and bleeding down on us. These gods and devils that came before us, that sit in some perpetual agony, agony swathed in peace. Peace found in the eternal rapture of poetry. It seethes, its saliva boiling over as it reacts to the way I place myself above it...so we must be one. We must be all at once nothing and poetry.

We must trace the eternal light so we may recite the old words to the new world. Let the light embers of poetry trace gently like fingers on skin, let the skin grow charred. We must die in its embrace so that it may grow, and know that though we can no longer be one,

we will always be one in poetry.