The dawn is blank
like the paper on my desk,
nauseous from the night before,
frozen like the ink in my hand.
Blank sheets all over the floor,
poetry is my mad lover,
blankness is betrayal,
a war lost,
unsung heroics of failure,
bittersweet kiss of defeat by my rhymes.
I pile up the blankness of the paper,
words echo through the gaps between them,
I look close, there's still poetry.

On a page, third from the top,
there's an ocean of yellow paint,
Van Gogh swims merrily on the surface
with both his lips glued.
after a dozen pages, on a paper not so yellow,
a doctor walks the street
with a suitcase full of gifts,
and a dog called death.

I wrote of a woman who
was burned by every man she loved,
wrote about each piece of her heart
thrown in the depth of space,
next to the moon and far apart.

I wrote of Plath on a coffee-stained paper,
of how intensely she held
the lips of death under the gas oven,
of how the smudged ink of Ariel cried
on the table,
screaming and roaring for her.

On some papers, blank and inked,
I wrote myself,
blankness isn't defeat.
blankness is the longest chapter of my life,
it's a legend.





RYS

When I see you,
I see nothing.
Not the stars,
neither the moon.
Are there clouds?
Any blue?
I can hardly say.

You're made of nothingness,
in my head.
Just a huge hollow void
of absolute emptiness.
In person, you were pretty.
But I do not remember,
neither the skin
nor the words,
but I do remember
calling you beautiful,
in my head.

In my head, though
you're more beautiful,
the sheer nothingness.
All over me like
a starless sky
on a drunken night,
when the woods stumble,
and the chair can't hold still.
All over my floor,
like crumbled pieces
of blank pages,
that scream dead poems.

You remind me of a diary,
that stinks in my closet.
so beautiful,
I was afraid to touch.
I never scribbled a word,
not even a smudge of ink,
untouched and flawless
and pointless.

In person, you aren't
that beautiful.
I do not want to touch you,
so maybe
I'll leave us undone,
because if I don't,
I'll lose the nothingness in you,
in my head
I'll have a face and a voice,
an image, a lady,
and maybe love
but mortality.

-RYS