As far as my understanding goes,
A poet very rarely knows
The journey he'll take when pen rests upon paper.
Will it be a love story, or some ******-Doo caper?
But I guess I don't know much about poetry,
Because, as others keep telling me,
A poem begins with an inspiration
Spurred on by a healthy dose of devotion.
But I'm rarely inspired, I write
barely, and most of it is trite.
But I take comfort in the fact
That, while my writing is lacking tact
Or symbolism, or inspiration, or even meaning,
At the end of the day, It always leaves me smiling,
And that's all I need.

I hope i cut so deep into that day
That it leaves a scar
And every year the date passes by
You think of me

I want to know just how you think.
How you function.
What makes your smile so big it's as if it will never fall.
The corners of your lips turn up so high.
I want to feel you in such a way that I can experience all of your hurts and all of your joys.
What would that be like.
How are you in the silence?
To know another soul so deeply.
So deeply that secrets don't exist and shame isn't present.
To know every dark corner of that mind.
What's it like?

Did he make you smile so much your cheeks were sore?
No.
Did he kiss you the way the sun kisses the horizon at sunset?
No.
Did he ever get so lost in your eyes that the only way to release him from the trance was by closing your eyes?
No.
Did his hands shake at the thought of losing you?
No.
Did he ever admit when he was wrong?
No.
Did he want you and only you?
No.
Did he tell you that you meant so much to him that if he lost you, his whole world would collapse?
No.
Did he send chills up your spine the moment his skin touched yours?
No.
Did he allow you to be free to make your own decisions?
No.
Did he make you the center of his world?
No.
Did he love you more than you loved him?
No.
Did he allow you to free yourself from him so that you could be happy?
No.
Did he remind you of how much he loves you everyday?
No.


I'm sorry, but he never loved you.




                              B.S.

my father and i were drinking orange juice at
two thirty in the morning when he turned to me and said,
“i never taught you that you could be anything you
wanted to be because the truth is that you can’t,”
and i decided he was right when i realized i was too
right-brained to work a nine-to-five job and that i’d rather
destroy a computer and call it art than create one and
call it science.

but maybe he was only thinking about the big picture,
and by now i’ve realized that the big picture is never
the most important and that the small scribblings that
mainly go unnoticed matter the most and i thought
back to when a tenth grade teacher had asked me a
simple question and expected a simple response,

and while i had given her a real answer, she claimed it
to be unrealistic and the corner of her lip twitched as she
tried to suppress a laugh, but i wasn’t laughing because
what’s so wrong about saying that, “maybe i want to be
your favorite constellation?” because it’s true —

and, “i want to be the goosebumps on your arms when you
hear your favorite song performed live. i want to be the aching in your
ribs after you’ve laughed too hard, your favorite Sunday dinner,
a constant reminder that you are beautiful and that you are
kind and that you don’t need anybody else to make you happy.
i want to be compassion. i want to be sympathy, treachery,
creativity. i want to be the reason you wake up in the middle
of the night without really understanding why. i want to be
the question, an answer, a hundred possibilities.”

she asked me what i wanted to be, and i told her i wanted
to be everything — and maybe other people don't know how
to feel the same way that i know how to feel,  and maybe that's
because we spend so much time teaching kids how to compute
and to quote instead of how to express and emote and i find that
to be very disappointing.