The question is
Where to begin?
Why, with honest heart
And boldly sin!
And sin I must
Against myself
Pinning the inkwell
A bespoken purpose
--The poetic confession
Since speech commands silence
And advances regression.
My courage it falters
And guts turn all queer
Neither could reckon
With our distances near
And confessing this outright
Is just plain absurd,
I hope I have made
My cowardice clear.
True, this is petty
And prideful at best
Poem’s the proper vehicle lest
My weakness runs wild
As ornery thoughts
And binds up my tongue
And stomach in knots.
But onward! I bore you!
My pen spitting gibb'rish
Thinking sense and writing none  
I’m too far to turn back
And the day is yet won!
But can I be blamed
For nerves all on end
When the single string in every thought
Goes day’s beginning to its end
And all around and back again?
This whole semester
I’ve felt a fool
Beside this mind of eloquence
Of enervating sensation
Like, I, a simple candle
And auroras’ collocation
On the clearest luminescent night
With incensing breeze blown left and right,
Coupled with creative flair
And womanly chic, short, brown hair
I’m distracted, diverted stupidly
A boy's been made
Of the man in me.
I’m a mustard seed among
Religious men,
And profanation blossoms
Brought to transcendent, if divine heights
My words reaching an Elysian place
Touching new Heavens
With (excuse the pun) Grace.
Please don’t hold daft obligation
That you must reciprocate
The sentiments, here, laid before you
And mushiness innate
But the purpose is here
Not to woo
Nay, to salve this tiny,
Yet consumptive flu
So for stoic, normal me
This is something radically new.
So excuse the upheaval
And heavily borne load
It’s just perseverance
Through pessimistic mode,
I know this is weighty
And clichéd and trite
But I've been made weary
(And that’s creepy a mite)
Through countless embattled days
And resultant restless nights
With no intention to do so.
I hope this has struck you
Not perturbed or amused
Because right now I’m trembling
Sclerotic and bruised
And will follow, oh follow
This to its end;
To see this message
Read in your hands.
But until then, condemned
To sleep sad and wake gaily
To think only one thought
And think that thought daily
And thought is of you
Of you,
–.

I was a bruised orange,
That round piece of fruit that had been dropped, over and over again.  
Dropped so many times, my insides had turned to sour mash.
(It was a distasteful sort of mush.)
I hid my mushiness behind an exterior of bright orange skin.

(I thought I had fooled everyone but myself.)

He swept into my life, in backward fashion,
Giving himself away to erase the disasters of my wounds.

He was eraser crumbs.
His history, one of being casually swept from the page
As others made their revisions.

Had he not been there?  
Life would have dug a hole through my crepe paper heart,
Scraping and scratching
With its hard, unforgiving end.

But he was eraser crumbs;
He slid easily across my page.

When your sister
died, it was the blue
box of Kraft Macaroni and
Cheese. Your half-
sister from your
father’s previous
marriage cooked it up
for you—she was only
a year or
two older than
you were—and you fell
asleep there on the
floor, where it remained half-
finished for the entire
night. When you
awoke the next
day, before you had even
opened your eyes, you 
thought for a brief
moment that maybe it
had all been just
a dreadful nightmare, but
then you opened them and
there the macaroni and
cheese still sat, half-
eaten on that paper
plate. No—
it had all
actually happened.

When your coworker
fatally poisoned
herself, you made
up your mind to
buy the nicest
ingredients you could
find and to cook the best
Italian pasta recipe you could
think of in order to
show your family
how much you loved
them. You wanted to be
present with them, to be still
alive with them. You
wanted to not
make the same
mistake twice, but
then there you were
at dinner, distant
for the entire
meal, unable to even
make simple
conversation, ashamed of
the awful contortions your
brain was doing in
order to process
your guilt over
her death.

When your father
died, it was some left-
over soup you had cooked
up a week prior. You were
embarrassed about how
the black-eyed peas and
sweet potatoes had turned out;
you apologized to your
wife for their mushiness,
and she smiled sadly and told
you it was the best
soup she had ever
tasted. After a week in
the refrigerator, the kale
tasted slimy. The soup was
overhot; its texture,
nonexistent. By
this point in your life, the
texture of nearly
everything—even that
of death—had become
wholly unremarkable
to you.

And when your old
friend from college
died, there was
no meal at all—just
a hasty cup of black
coffee you poured
yourself right before the
big work presentation
began. The text
message said that
he had thrown
himself from atop a
skyscraper in lower
Manhattan, and that
he had finalized his
divorce just a few
months prior. You
thought about calling
off the meeting, but your
boss said that he
would be in
attendance and, grimly,
you decided to swallow
your bitter emotions
right along with the
coffee—you didn’t
want to let
him down.