Too often, when I begin my poems- I turn on the caps lock key. I want the letters to be big and tower above my body so maybe I’ll be able to believe they actually mean something. What I am still learning, is you cannot always start out screaming. You can not always begin with ripping your hair out and spitting out your own tongue, you cannot always start with passion. Sometimes you need to work up to it as if you are riding the gondola just to see the sunset meet the waves. For so long, I believed poetry wasn’t real unless it was uninterrupted. It didn’t truly matter unless it all come out at once, unless you are imagining and rewriting the next line before you even finish the first. Is it even art if you stop halfway to think about what word sounds best?

Well, who’s to say its not?

Art exists for two reasons, to make your audience feel something, and to calm down the rapids within your own veins. Sometimes we choke or we spit or we throw it all up but no matter how it flies out of our paper matte lips, it still fills our lungs the same. You are like the ash I flick off of the burning skyline my cigarette is. I always compared you to an ocean, because I could drown in your eyes, but you are not quite so vast. You are not as important as I make you out to be. (Or at least that’s what I’d like to believe.)

Maybe you are everything, maybe you are the shooting star that rolls by my window just slow enough for me to spot it in the sky. Maybe you are that crack in the sidewalk where the weeds and dandilions took out their latest mortgage. Maybe you are all the things I told myself I would detatch from your name.

I cannot keep these promises to myself no matter how hard I try, two years later and you’re still my biggest influence. There has been a block in my bloodstream since I lifted my fingers from the keyboard, since I let the lightning stop starting fires.
There has been a hold up but if we are putting it all out in the open, I still try to swallow my feelings for you because you liked me best when the fibers of my sweater were caught in my zipper. You liked me best when I had too much cotton in my mouth for me to even breathe.

I’ve been spitting and coughing up poetry since I could speak, I have been substituing and backspacing until I found perfection in my own words, especially considering I couldn’t find anything else about myself even remotely close to perfect.
You are the only thing in this world that’s truly left me speechless.

But the words I never got the chance to say, are growing stale on my tongue.
I call this; rocket ship poetry.
It is like the day after the night of drinking. Of stomach bile and bread eating and promising to a god that only exists once in a while that you will never, ever, drink again.
It is the way you remember an angry middle aged man banging on the door before he burst in, fuming mad that you forgot to turn the lights off.
It is real and it happens so quick sometimes you don’t even see it coming. It is the pink ***** on your window sill from that party where you didn’t even feel drunk.
The time where silver smiles painted your skin to match the depth of your veins. All the flowers you picked out of the ground from their roots.
There is no stopping it when it’s arrived, there is no way to unravel it.
It is a rocket ship because you count down the seconds until take off and before you know it the stars are in your ears and you hit the caps lock key, and it isn’t because you want the letters to mean something, it’s because they mean so much already that you need to raise your voice.
You need to stop using periods and start using commas because after awhile you get tired of being interrupted. You get tired of taking two trips and saying what you want to scream. You just get tired. There is broken glass rattling around inside of you, and sometimes it’ll slash you open from the inside but you are going to be okay.
Sometimes you will get too close to the flame,
but it’s better to get burnt,
then to burn out.