it is baffling that after
a series of unfortunate/emotional/fulfilling events that
someone would ask to use
one word to describe how
                                              you feel
                                              the day was.


my teacher once told me to
cut down on my sentences because
apparently ‘shut up!’ was more
effective than ‘shut up you are
very noisy and disturbing me.’


"but," i protested, "i am a long-distance runner.
my periods end far past the 400m mark.
besides my ‘and’s are your punctuation equivalent and
my full stop your ‘the end’ because i
can’t stop won’t stop not when my chest
is so full of air and lead and
pounds like a mad man locked up
not when there are tyre marks and red lights be ******
not when dots and curves and dashes feel like moving day
as though you can pack feelings into neat spaces.”


how i feel
         my day is
is not an entity to fulfill your collection of
singular adjectives because no
one word explains the comfort of a
dear friend in a day with
too many questions and far too few answers
because the dictionary cannot match being sad and angry
for being sad and annoyed for being angry for being sad.
so know that when i say ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or even ‘reflective’
they are poor substitutes for all the
nouns and prepositions i force back down.