If my work were my child
It’d be the middle one
In between my perfectionism, the elder
And my self-loathing, the younger

I phone up inspiration
To help with the troublesome kid
But she never returns my calls anymore

Motivation, I haven’t spoken to in ages
She left when my insecurities
Got the better of me
Said I’d become a pathetic husk of a man

Look at me
I don’t even have the energy to rhyme
Better toss this one on the pile
With the rest of them

What’s the pile, you ask?
It’s where I keep all my
No-effort narratives
Forgotten frivolities
Miserable musings
Worthless writings
Inadequate ideas
Laughable lines
Soulless stories
Cold chapters
Terrible titles
Bad books
Garbage

The pile is large
And it only gets larger
As time progresses
Because the quality
of something I write
Quickly regresses

I don’t do well in small places
Claustrophobia of the mind
Cause my mind is vast as space is
Yet space is hard to find

I sometimes wield the pen in spite
Of why I am convinced I write
The poetic words that I spill

Spill like a glass of water
That’s been stirred to overflow
By my feelings and thoughts or so
I have gotten to know
The will of the flow
The direction that it wants to go
That’s what po-
etry is all about, no?

Because poem starts
with a P for personal
Not popular
Or populous
Not for the people who prefer prying
Pickpocketing or playful plying
In the placid plains inside
It’s for the persons who pray
To the poet’s plight

To go out on an odyssey,
with an O, the second letter
Not omniscient
Or omnipotent
For oscillating with your own
Is only for ones once overthrown
By an onslaught of hydrogen per-oxide
Those ostracized and odd
Off, yet open to the outside

E is the third letter
And it stands for emotional
Or extorted
until emptiness
Extended
after the excavation had ended
and emotion was evacuated ere
The embodiment of ecstasy
Had been enterred here

Lastly M stands for me!
Me, myself and I!
Not the masses who maim
My mind and meticulously aim
For the mark on my midbrain
Just the men and wo-men who make do
With musing about the mechanisms of
Mother Earth and her miracles too

Poetry is a gift
Out with it to be at ease
Especially for yourself
May it help you find peace

It’s funny how things go
Sometimes
You write that you don’t know
In rhymes
A decision like do or die
A decision like crash or fly
But when you do, you might crash
And when you fly, you might die

I was intertwined
Woven into the vines
Of doubt
And the worst thing was
I no longer wanted out

Trapped like a fly
In a web of lies
That I myself had stitched
And the worst thing was
I didn’t know which was which

Lie or truth
Die or do
Shy or brash
Fly or crash
Could you tell me which one’s better?
Because I didn’t think I’d ever
Know
No,
No, never

And the funny part is!
The decision’s been made for me
And it’s just now that I see
The vines around me crumble
As the ground I stand on rumbles,
With the sound of understanding
The same ground which my mind was
standing

And the funny part is!
I realize the truth now
The one I’d always known
As the spider webs untangled
And dropped me, beat and mangled
In the orchard of mindful prying
Dropped an apple on the hammock
in which my mind was lying

I start to raise my voice
“stop, I’ve made my choice!”
Wave my arms around
As they finally lie unbound

It can’t be too late…

Even though I took too long
I know I took to long-
ing
For the lyrics of a song
Or the lines of a poem
To give me a sign
But I’ve made up my own mind
I want you to be mine

I once trapped myself in an echo room

Said some words
Heard some words
Spoke a verse
returned a verse
I wanted to converse
With myself
Yet it made things only worse

What I expected
Was not what came true
For every me
There was a you
For every yes
There was a no
For every high
There was a low

And I grew suspicious
Of the vicious
Malicious
Tone at which those words were uttered
While my say was muttered
Watered
down
Spoken like a sad clown
With a frown
On my face
That grew deeper with every brazen
Contradiction that I got
Though paradoxical it was not

Because I realized soon enough
That I’m the one who said this stuff
And the reason I was being so rough
So tough
Was because I didn’t listen enough
To the different sides of me
All two, three
Or four, five, eight, ten
Perhaps even a thousand of them

Yet how do they expect me to!?
I don’t know what to do
I’m just lost and confused
In the middle of a tug of war
A war
“To determine who you are”

Tick tock
Goes the clock
Held under key and lock
Unwavering like a rock
See?
No time to take a seat
Every second is a beat
Every lifetime is a song, feat
The one and only Father Time
Every hour is a rhyme
day a line
month a verse
I want to curse
At the breakneck flow of the sand
Through the hourglass
That’s the palm of his hand
I want this tune to stop
I want the mic to drop
I want gravity to disappear
So that time could be suspended here

We listen to the same songs
I don’t want to be
The reason you hate them now
The reason they hurt you now
I don’t want to cloud
The meaning of their sound
With the memory of me
Of times that were more happy

We like the same food
I don’t want to be
The reason you eat no longer
The reason your meals take longer
I don’t want that hunger
To keep you suspended, hung or
Turn into a craving for me
For times that were more happy

We play the same games
I don’t want to be
The reason you start no more
The reason you quit before
You get to the final stage or
Go through the final boss door
For
Behind is a twisted image of me
Of times that were more happy

We live off the same air
I don’t want to be
The reason your breathing fades
The reason your heart berates
Slowing down your heart rate
Blood boiling with hate
Because your heart fell for the bait
Of a future with me
Of times that would be happy