I could feel the words under my skin
And I scratched them out
And I was bleeding poetry,
And you were frantically sewing my wounds together with your words-
We were leaking poetry
And they collected our words and cut and pasted and cut and pasted
And now others are clicking to my blood and unravelling your stitches
And now our words don't reach our lips
Our words are leaking out of us,
I can't articulate in prose anymore
And my words cease to mean anything if they aren't metaphor upon simile upon connotation and implication
And now others are clicking to my thoughts,
Absorbing them before I can, understanding me before I can
And I am crying haikus
The silver trails here
Do not mean what they used to
They are not enough
And I am exhaling extended metaphors
And my breath is something else
My lungs hold comparisons
And they do not taste sweet like air
We are unravelling under the spotlight,
Loose threads are left strewn across an open mic night,
Swept up when light reveals our poetry to be rags and tattered cotton,
The threads are gathered and remade into a gift for someone else
And we are left empty and naked.
But we will keep bleeding for the crowd-
It is what we live for.