How to Write a Poem:

***** your finger and bleed directly onto the page.
Buy a typewriter from a thrift store and poetically sit in a coffee
shop until your muse walks in.
Sleep with your professor and let her write your poems for you.
Hold private seances at the cemetery.
Read your high school yearbook
until your poems seethe with forgotten teenage angst.
Specifically berate your current lover
but then assure him the words aren’t about him.
Drink yourself into oblivion
but blame your inner artist for your demons.
List all the sins of your mother
and conveniently forget those of your father.
Clutch your pen until a stigmata appears in your hands.
Speak your truth,
but tell your friends
your poems aren’t from your own point-of-view.