for every poem i'd ever written,
i wondered what my near candid thoughts
sound like to a stranger;
when i wear my heart on my sleeve
except it's draped in metaphors and vague sentences
how is anyone meant to understand
that this is the beautiful boy i'm talking about?
or that on some very specific day
i endured a trauma no one will fully know?

often i feel sad
in an empty way
like a mug no one drinks out of
and i don't even have enough emotion within me to write poems
so i read other people's poems;
perhaps it will fill some void within me
if i find the perfect set of words to explain everything away
and yet
none of them make sense to me
every trauma, every boy loved
doesn't make sense to me when i haven't experienced it

and perhaps i love poetry for all the wrong reasons,
because i never just
find it pretty;
but instead put the ugliest words inside me on paper
and shape them until i can stand to look at them

and there is little to nothing honest about it
but i am usually choking with these words
and anything remotely true on paper
may just ease my heartache,
so i write;