i like free verse poetry
if you couldn't tell
cause writing rhyming poems, for me,
never turns out well

it feels like i am in a cage
when i try to rhyme my lines
i have to write to a certain beat
so my verses are such confined

free verse poetry is seen as fake
in so many writers' eyes
but it frees my mind to release its thoughts
that might have been my demise

and with that in mind,
i don't think i want to rhyme anymore.
  i don't know if this is real poetry,
   i don't know if i'm a real writer,
    i don't know if i'm doing this right,
     i don't know if this writing is right,
but i know that i like free verse, and for me,
that's enough.

i hear my dad cough downstairs
he is fifty years old and
     i realize
that we all will die someday

will i die with grace?
   will i die naturally or by my own hand?
     will anyone miss me?
       will i have done anything for the world?

                                         i am but a child
i've lived for only a decade and a few years
      
and yet
            i'm sure
i will not make it to fifty

last night i got angry
        it was a very strange feeling because
i've never really gotten   angry before


i got so angry i went outside and
                ripped 3 branches of leaves from a bush

i stared at them
               a plant's livelihood
sitting in my hand
and suddenly i was a murderer

i began to cry
and cry and cry
i didn't want to get that angry
or go ballistic
but i felt mad
in more ways than one.

titles are even more difficult for me to compose.
i could spend ten minutes typing and
deleting and typing and
deleting and typing and
deleting
a good title for a poem that isn't that good to begin with
do i use a line from the poem for the title?
do i tell the story of the poem with the title?
do i help people understand the poem with the title?

i write poems with feeling,
and i write them before i name them,
so by the time i get to writing
the title,
i've used up all the emotion
in the poem's words


       and now there is none left
for the title

There is something audible in the silence of a bathroom
when the walls are bland beige washed orange by the artificial light.
A bug sits on the wall and something tells me to get rid of it,
                         good riddance
but I can’t gather the courage to do it.

There is a hole in my chest where my heart should be. I could say my heart is light but I can’t feel its weight in my ribcage and I can't hear the beating and I can’t even feel the blood it should be pumping through my body but I’m still alive and that’s the only confirmation I get that
  my
   heart
    is
     still
      there.

Everything is quiet in this bland orange bathroom, and the bug still sits on the wall.

I climb on a counter.

Face to face with this bug, I see its antennae wiggling back and forth.
There is life inside of it.
I can’t squash it.

                 The light bulbs washing the bathroom orange haven’t
                                 been dusted since we moved in.

I climb off the counter and place the ball of toilet paper down.
The bug is alive and by some miracle,
so
  am
   I.

My heart remains somewhere inside my chest,
numbed.

This room is silent too. Nothing but the white noise of the ceiling fan and the furious tapping of the keys on the keyboard composing my mess of a mind into a mess of a poem.

Maybe now it is as quiet inside my head as it is in these rooms.

Maybe now I can sleep.

The bug remains on the ceiling.