Poetry can **** you
when you shut
yourself inside of it.

It doesn’t want you
looking for better words
in other poems.

It wants to cage you
to the corners
of a sheet of paper.

It doesn’t want you
to breathe the thing
it won’t allow.

It wants you to use
just enough imagination
to finish it and
throw the overflow away.

For the time you write it
it has its own imagination
that refuses to acknowledge
that yours exists.

Until it’s done
you are it’s prisoner.

Only then will it open up
and let you breathe,
let itself breathe.