He writes poetry like it is the air he breathes
he chokes on his own words and trips on his sentences
And stumbles over his paragraphs.
He writes like it is the only thing keeping him sane,
And maybe it is.
He writes like he’s running out of time—
Like he can’t possibly finish everything
He has to write about
In the time he has left—
Like all that mattered was him
And the words that filled up
The pages of his journal messily.
He writes until there is nothing left to write about.
He writes about everything and nothing:
Heartache and happiness,
The waves and the shore . . .
He writes about the things he can never say out loud.
He writes about the worlds he wants to live in.
He writes and he writes and he writes
Until there is nothing left to his life but words and sentences and paragraphs and stories.
But you see, no matter how many universes he creates
Or how many tales he writes about
He can never escape
The gruelling reality
Of his world—
Bleak and gray as it is to him.
He looks to poetry for refuge,
Thinks that maybe words
Were his own personal weapon.
And why not?
His words built up mountains and created castles in the sky,
And he knew the same words were unerring tools of destruction
That could tear apart the strongest mountains with a few
Well-crafted sentences.
He thinks that maybe if he wanted for anything,
He could write it into existence.
So he writes.
Poem after story after poem—
All about her,
Hopefully and naively thinking
That maybe if she read them
She’d know
About the nights he spent writing her name over and over
On the sheets of paper on his desk
Like a personal prayer
Hoping it would be enough to bring her back to him
But he wakes up alone every morning anyway
And learns that words can only do so much.
He knows now that no matter how many passages he repeats
Or how many times he writes his words down over and over
Poetry doesn’t always set things right
But it does add some beauty to the world.
His words do hold some kind of power over something
And that, he thinks, is beautiful.
It is beautiful.
And he thinks maybe this is something he’s meant to do.
So he writes.