You are the cause of your own suffering*
I tell myself everyday,
but I still bathe in silt and shame.
Rinse. Recycle. Repeat.

I tell myself everyday
how mundane it is to be redundant:
Rinse. Recycle. Repeat.
Everybody that looks at me sees

how mundane it is to be redundant.
You only get one masterpiece;
everybody that looks at me sees
that's not a rainbow, it's an oil spill.

You only get one masterpiece,
but I still bathe in silt and shame -
that's not a rainbow, it's an oil spill.
You are the cause of your own suffering.

Men try to mend my wounds by spewing lines like  "But you're too pretty to be sad"
as if I asked for this.
They try and try again,
saving is in their culture.
Chivalry is etched in them like a childhood scar
Their forests are filled
with knights on white horses
as they've been taught.
Mine are not.
My woods reak of matted down blankets from days without movement.
They feel like exhaustion.
Sometimes you can even hear the sound of their roots being pulled
right out of the ground
that shrieking sound will leave you
Awake for days.
"too pretty to be sad" will not place these rotten roots in graves.
My trees have aged much faster than theirs, 21 years old, bending too easily with the wind.
as it howls, they cower,
I wonder when they will break
and who will be there to hear them.
Because sometimes I feel that people only like to look at my flowers,
and not bear what they have to offer, what they would say. Those sounds would scare them away. Sometimes I feel that people only like to look at my leaves.
They're too pretty to die, anyway.

Secrets, you said, would hold us two apart;
You'd have me know of you your least transgression,
And so the intimate places of your heart,
Kneeling, you bared to me, as in confession.
Softly you told of loves that went before--
Of clinging arms, of kisses gladly given;
Luxuriously clean of heart once more,
You rose up, then, and stood before me, shriven.

When this, my day of happiness, is through,
And love, that bloomed so fair, turns brown and brittle,
There is a thing that I shall ask of you--
I, who have given so much, and asked so little.
Some day, when there's another in my stead,
Again you'll feel the need of absolution,
And you will go to her, and bow your head,
And offer her your past, as contribution.

When with your list of loves you overcome her,
For Heaven's sake, keep this one secret from her!

Woke up this morning with that kinda existential dread you feel, you know, when you wake up in the morning.

when words become flat,
their definitions frail or forgotten

they blur and mingle with each other,
like a cluster of long-legged spiders making love

no longer a block of text to be interpreted or understood,
but an illustration triggering loose and fleeting thoughts

thoughts uncoordinated and fatuous,
but there they are