I’ve been pulling words
From me like splinters from my palm,
With razor in hand
Peeling back dead skin to show the articulations,
And it feels like I’m losing myself when I take it out.
Each bit of language splatting on linoleum floors in front of a cackling audience.
I didn’t want you to hear this.
I don’t think I can say it. I think I’ll go home.
I’m losing steam through my mouth and moving nowhere
I don’t have any answers, unimportant questions to ******* peers
And I’m going in circles with them, and with myself.

Last month I tried to write a poem about childhood
When I lived in that house in the woods by the lake
I can think of the pictures but I can’t get them together
There were times when I walked in the rain to school,
And there were times when I told my mom “I wish I wasn’t born” because I had to go to sleep at 9:30pm but,
I keep thinking of the last time I saw my mom,
She was looking much weaker
And the doctors gave her morphine for the pain
Sleeping in the hospital bed
In the living room in which I grew up.
It didn’t seem real.
I was too shocked to speak
My only resolve to everything,
"That's life"
But that is life.
I don't need to narrate the hole in my throat.
Doesn't the soliloquy sound like a
Crying baby?
I am the melodramatic Hamlet crying for you now.
Don’t look at me.

I’m running circles on ***** laundry.