i knew a girl once,
she got a tattoo stenciled “tabula rasa”
and could never see the irony.
irony is cruel, after all, and there’s a lot of things
we chose not to see, obliviously.
irony is a musician with a deaf daughter, a painter with a blind son.
but this was just a metaphor, what we’re headed for
always heading home in the wrong direction,
but i’m not a suicidal head case,
just a dreamer who got high on outer space
and this was what i wrote for icarus
before he gunned me down out of the sky
i don’t why, but my wings tend to get tangled whenever i try to fly.
typos slip past my copy edit and sometimes i still feel pathetic;
i am a gallery of scars.
if life is performance art then i’m a ******* masterpiece.
it’s all growing pains,
knowing better doesn’t always mean you do better.
so pain is necessary. so pain is unavoidable.
but i don’t wanna to live a life where every single week is
“i just gotta get through this week”
but good things don’t only come from pain
and poetry is not sad by definition.
i know we tend to romanticize the tears in our eyes
but i wanna grit my teeth into a grin,
i wanna know about sinking because i'm learning how to swim.
and gravity was never the enemy,
at least not how i thought it would be.
gravity was just doing its job,
it didn’t know the way it was weighing me down like quicksand
and making it so hard to get up out of bed.
i will never understand
why happiness is so attainable for some
and so unattainable for others.
but maybe that’s just the hairline difference
between happiness and joy --
one is more circumstantial that the other.
lately, my brain’s been stalling like an engine on overdrive,
it wants to die out but somehow the heart’s keeping it alive.
so this is the sound two hearts make when they collide,
we write poems and never talk about it.
i write mile long poems and i’ve got a tongue like a riddle
and love’s just a word, but don’t you dare tell me
that words aren’t important.
you know better.
smashing hearts like hundred dollar guitars,
we all wanna pretend we’re rockstars.
you know, some people get drunk just
so they can see something in the sky.
and i need these lines,
they build up the structure in my spine
i don’t know always who i am
but i know who i haven’t been.
i know who i want to be.