I had gone in to write you a new one
a new poem about
something else, I can't remember.
maybe about your hair falling across my face,
maybe it was about your laugh ringing like a bell,
maybe something about that moment on my couch when i slid my hand up the leg of your loose trousers, on a quest to make you make more sounds and found delight in your gasp against my ear

but I was shot in the chest with a shotgun when I discovered , that it was the deadline, the dead lines of my poetry
buried in a cyber grave never to be uncovered, or read, again.
they were gone.

I had 120 days, they said, before they shut down my dot edu email account.
costs money to keep it open, I guess and god knows I didn't pay them enough of it

and the email was linked to some other app on my phone and when they took it from me, the evidence of the person I was 10 years ago, 12, 14 years ago

and the poetry was there.
it was in that stupid ******* notes app on my ******* Google pixel 4a 5g, ******* ****


I had written one about the tips of your fingers

and one where I delightedly called you my lover

and another one I talked about my friends at the party I threw to mourn the November election results and how beautiful it is to be ******* alive, it was going to be really good

but instead there is a strange angry emptiness inside that stupid ******* notes app,
strange angry emptiness
inside of me,
building like a jenga tower, soon to collapse
into tears
teetering



the poetry was gone from me for a long time.
I touched
no pens, no journal pressed open to worn pages

my ex's dog chewed up my last notebook, right after I decided I was going to write again. I had left it open,
mid poem writing, when I had to
stop
to take
a
****.

came back and pages were all over the yard, in that dog's mouth, torn to wet shreds my poetry, my
dead
lines


the universe is conspiring against me

and somehow I cannot
*******
stop.


my words simply seep out of me
like my period in the bathtub,

it's most inconvenient