To me it's strange, the way they speak.
The poets of the ivory peaks.
The ivory's gone, but it's some other thing
I can't afford. That luck won't bring.

Their words are nonsense, their tales obscure,
and I endure
strange sentences and structures
to be a part, and perhaps procure
an understanding of the
heavy handed
application of articulation.
The inebriation of contemplation
of words and rhymes.
Perhaps it will come to me in time.

It is the story of my life.
An unavoidable,
like pain, like light.
The door is open, the hands invite
but the hearts are frozen, with hands that write
about love and romance, pain and longing
where is the tale of the brothers belonging
and sisters working the marathon strings
of shifts to pay to raise a child.
The horrors of a society gone wild.

Where is the working class writer of poems
the wordsmith trained on the limited knowing
where is the voice of those rarely heard?
Where are their stories? Where are their words?

We are children of stars, all of us each,
if you look way back far beyond memory's reach.
Past fire and lightning, spirit and beast,
our atoms return, and stars we complete.

My love for you is vast and wild,
A roaring star in endless deep.
Through cosmic tides, so free, beguiled,
Your gravity—my soul to keep.

A roaring star in endless deep,
You burn within my boundless sky.
Your gravity—my soul to keep,
No force can break, no time deny.

You burn within my boundless sky,
A nebula of light untamed.
No force can break, no time deny,
Nor name the fire that we have claimed.

A nebula of light untamed,
Through cosmic tides, so free, beguiled.
Nor name the fire that we have claimed,
My love for you is vast and wild.

The cot lies flat beneath my spine,
the air is dry, the color pale.
A red pipe runs a crooked line—
it hisses softly without fail.

My skull is tight, a failing drum.
A piston coughs, not quite in tune.
The light above begins to hum—
the ceiling bows like stretched-out dune.

The walls breathe slow beneath their grime.
My teeth are ticking in my head.
A drip repeats what someone said—
in words that almost taste like time.

A shadow climbs the angled steel.
The pipe above begins to shake.
Its breath is hot enough to feel—
or maybe that’s my own mistake.

I try to count my breaths aloud.
The numbers don’t return to me.
There’s humming in my inner ear—
a song I can’t unsee.

The cot is gone. I float in chrome.
My thoughts are welded to the wall.
A whisper speaks without a mouth.
I’m weightless in the sprawl.

I peel my skin to find the verse—
each line a nerve, each word a curse.
My fingers crack, the ink runs red—
I bind the poem, stitch the dead.

The page is meat. I carve it clean.
The stanzas pulse. The gaps still scream.
I press my voice through shattered teeth,
then choke it back in paper sheaths.

The world wants sugar, quick and bland—
a feeding trough, not sleight of hand.
It gorges on what’s soft and safe,
then spits me out, still torn and chafed.

They scroll past entrails shaped like truth,
preferring memes to bleeding youth.
I gut myself for depth and grace,
but all they see’s a blank, bruised face.

I nailed my heart to every page—
they laughed and said, “You’re just a phase.”
The words rot slow beneath the glass,
while bots applaud what cannot last.

They drained the soul from every shelf,
left only echoes of the self.
And still I write, while maggots hum
inside the mouth my lines come from.

I cough up metaphors and bile,
They call it “grim” and click “unstyle.”
Yet here I stand, spine sharp with spite,
my hands flayed raw, refusing flight.

This isn’t art that begs to please—
I write in wounds, not symphonies.
Let trend and comfort feed the swine,
my blood is real. These guts are mine.

Tired is the hush that falls on the bones,
a slow collapse behind the eyes—
like dusk unrolling through the halls
of thought, where once bright echoes rise.

Tired in the mind is static hum,
pages blurred and drifting slow,
words that once leapt sharp and sure
now stumble, slurred, and cease to flow.

Tired in the flesh is heavy steps,
shoulders pulled by unseen hands,
the climb of stairs a mountain now,
the bed a far and foreign land.

Tired in the heart is quiet sighs,
smiles held up like broken glass,
the weight of joy too much to lift,
the days too wide, the nights too vast.

Each kind of tired speaks its own,
in ache, in fog, in silence deep—
a different shape of letting go,
a different way of falling sleep.