I.
This is just another bad poem
Just vomited-thoughts-left-on-paper poem
This is a collection of grammatical errors
This would surely make my English teacher cringe
But no worries, I didn’t write this for her

II.
This bad poem is for you

May my subject and verb disagreement
remind you of all those misunderstandings that lead to raised voices
and nights where I cried myself to sleep

Sentence construction was never my strength, it still isn’t, maybe that’s why you never truly understood me—
called me difficult and bipolar
You said that I was too much

Did it ever occur to you that you might just misread me, like homonyms,
same words but with different meanings
misread my jealousy with accusations,
my concern for excessive affection

You said that I loved you too much
but darling, did you even love me at all?

Did I put too much meaning on your words,
turned them into similes and metaphors?
Turned your literal statements into figures of speech
You told me that you liked me,
so I blissfully interpreted it as a hyperbolic expression— called it love when obviously it wasn’t

III.
I was never good at using punctuations
I put too much commas,
unnecessary, misused, I kept trying to hold on
Afraid of the inevitable end,

Switched to semi-colons in an attempt to make it a few words longer

Because despite all our grammatical errors
no matter how shameful our piece of literature was to the English language

It was beautiful to the untrained eye,
To those who read poetry as it is
To those who don’t dig deep in search of true meaning behind the metaphors
It was beautiful to me

But I eventually learned that infinitives and infinities are different,
in spite of sharing infinite as the root word
Like our love,

started with something so promising
but unlike most novels,
there’s no happy ending

So I accepted defeat,
accepted the inevitable and bitter end
No more committing the same mistakes over and over again,
the same words over and over again,

Accepted the fact that synonyms existed,
words with the same meaning but also entirely different
new and unfamiliar, foreign and peculiar

IV.
I accepted defeat
No more commas or semi-colons
We have reached the couplet of our free formed sonnet—

I was never good with endings, I don’t think I’ll ever be,
So darling I hand you the pen, set us both free.

I lay in your bed.
I shouldn't have been there.
But still I lay in your bed,
And I found a hair.
Too long to be yours.
Too blonde to be mine.
I'm no longer yours,
But I still wish you were mine.

Winding roads and one-way traffic
Heading to a poetry reading,
rounding every turn
like a metaphor
emerges from a idea.
Passing  headlights
squinted eyelids,
Ditchweed on the roadsides
lay flat and brown
on icelandic mudbeds.
Driving through a bare, tree-lit tunnel,
a library smiles off in the distance.
                            ---
Standing behind a podium
ready to send my words off
to sneak into a listener's mind
like a Trojan Horse,
let them deploy an army of sword-less warriors
ready for action.
A perpendicular sequence of events
reveal new paths on an old map.
On the road again,
back home,
the sunrise in my rearview mirror
reaches my imagination.

It's sad to see everything pass away so fast
It can't be understood how many lifes were left behind
No explanation for such a tragic tragedy
But our hearts and souls are with all your friends and families
Today more than ever today we are one

We realize our mortality
We live to give love
To those who have left the planet
To those who gave it all
You graced us with your game
And thankful forever we are

An example of all is possible
An example of courage
And insatiable thirst for glory
You have taught us
We have learned
And forever grateful we are

FORZA CHAPECOENSE

You love me like twitchy fingers love pulling the trigger,
Not at all, and then all at once;
You replaced arrows with bullets,
And instead of filling with love, my heart poured out blood

You love me like tear gas loves open eyes,
To wish me blind to the things you've done;
You didn't think, you never do think
Can your conscious be clear if you don't have one?

You loved me like metal loves a microwave,
To make it spark and set fire;
Carelessness is antonymous with admiration,
And you always did admire destruction

"What do you think heaven looks like?"
"Clouds. Sunshine. Angels."
"But really? You don't think heaven has
desks and post offices and plastic
grocery bags?"
"Probably not."
"Oh."