It's a free world,  
You choose when you're born,  
then fill a form, an early warn.  

It's a free world,
You apply to meet your end,  
Just sign the sheet and send.  

It's a free world—
so they all say,  
We chose to struggle every day.  

It's a free world,
We picked the pain, the loss, the mess—  
Of course, we chose our loneliness.  

It's a free world,
love.

The poets I saw—  
the ones they envied,  
clean-cut skill,  
perfect in articulation.  

Lips of orators,  
Shakespearean quills—  
bequeathed to their palms,  
riddle-rs.  

They pen on how to change generations,  
gain the strength of bulls,  
surf tsunamis,  
**** racism.  

The poets I saw—  
I can't unlatch their shoes.  
I only type as I wait  
for my soup to cool,  
with a tear and a red cheek.  

I only write  
to simmer the screams  
in my head.

I decide
when to call my mother-
and she hangs up mid-sentence.
when to kiss my rocks
when to fly a kite.

I decide
which flower in the garden to water-
which ones to spit on.
when to wear my purple socks
when to throw my left shoe.

I decide
when to jump rope
when to bomb my living room
when to milk a horse-
then circumcise it's colts-
and burn its stable.

I decide
When to go to church
and wait until they sound the bell-
then slip out the side door
and go rob a bank.

I am unruly!
I am my own storm.

In the day  
when sundry eyes cast envious glances,  
we share the same couch—  
your head resting in my lap,  
your temple syncing with my pulse.  

In the night
just you and me—  
or you and me separated by screens,  
your breath curling like a rattlesnake,  
your vampire teeth peeking through.  

You don’t reply.  
You answer in your head—  
or not at all.  
You skip my texts like stones on water.  

And I—  
I cannot cry.  
That’s what I know.  
I’m a man, darling.  
I have manly genes.  
So I forge words.  

I write them until I cannot,  
until the rhyme dries up—  
when all poets sleep,  
when my foes grow tired of watching,  
when creatures of the night stop chiseling the air.  

Still,  
I type—  
through the silence.

I'm not a poet
I'm just emotional
twenty-something emotions
those hit hard

I'm not a poet
only a sleepwalker,
my fingers burning to type
my laptop keyboard so well-lit
so I fall into the desire

I'm not a poet
I just whisper to a quiet altar called Hello Poetry
a fatal attraction
so I type
welcome to the cult