"What are you afraid of?"

"Ghosts, killers, guns?"

I'm afraid

of you.

You who hold the power in your hands

to break me open

and leave.

You who hold the ability

to tell me I don't matter

and the authority

for me to believe you.

I'm afraid of betrayal,

of not being right for you.

I'm afraid you will hate me

afraid of losing my friends, so few.

You made me a mixtape

didn't write down the names

Track 1,

Track 2,

that's all that you gave.

I'll never know the names of those songs

but it will not have mattered

for the lyrics all say the same thing,

that you love me,

and that is what this mixtape thinks.

I had a dream

you gave me a car

something had happened to you,

you couldn't go far.

In my dream

I didn't know how to drive

and I crashed your car

the two of us trapped inside.

I had to repaint your car

to get rid of the red

and fix the dents

you left behind.

He is a sculpture

made of a blend

metal on the outside,

porcelain on the in.

He speaks in soft bursts of thunder,

in love,

outside he is wonder

but will collapse with a shove.

She is art personified

she speaks in soft bursts

of golden sunlight.

She is thin

and shivering

she is sad;

she is withering.

When I think of the word, poets,

I see a small group of people huddled around a tiny tinny coffee table

heads close together as they produce what is ultimately their life and death.

When I think of the word, poets,

I see a single bearded man standing

at a small stage in front of two person tables

with a crumbled piece of paper clutched in his ever aging world changing hands.

When I think of the word, poets,

I do not see a group of teenagers circled around one another in a clear classroom

with a box of cheep cookies

trading words and telling jokes.

When I think of the word, poets,

I don't see the boy with lingering loneliness, or

the girls with brightly dimmed eyes.

I see the Greats,

The Bukowskis, the Beats,

without realizing that one day

we may join them.

Someone wrote a poem about me

Once

Wrote me in as a hand holding the chain of a swing

One of two hands,

keeping them safe,

With my other hand I feel like I carry the knife

but that hand is for our

collective protective

our blockade of secrets

We Must Keep Hidden

from the world.