What are you hiding from
In the grand pictures you paint

Surely you must know by now
That stories are only stories
Never mind the gold coating your fingertips
And dripping sweetly from your lips

Did you really think you could forget
In the shadows of this ink
That this is all you have

i wish to be a writer
i truly do
but as money is the end to all means
and art is absent in the minds of men
i shall succumb to the streets of washington
a slave to the dutiful dreams of others
no longer embraced by the wonder of my own words

The poet, decadent
I and he and it
In old shivers and inebriation
We take virtue and fold it
Into ink-beguiled truths
Formless vocation, rough vernacular
Soft from jagged distance
Come closer, now insincere
Hard and ragged, vile fingers
They hold not beauty
But seething desire
Uncouth ambition
Trained to sour excellence
Impeccable sin of tainted life
Bless the fiends
Build them a nest in hell
Allow them to earn this prize
A prize of ailing drink
Drowned in saccharine agony
Are their unnamed tongues
Speaking new extremities
On a road too severe
May they write their own coffins
In the image of a mirror

Pen-named or inked-- 
her wrist swivels. 
She's had many names, this author. 

even through so many lives
still learning how to be unafraid. 

Her wrist swivels. The page turns. 

And the blank pages terrorize
like a cliff.

and she, on the edge, 
does not know how to jump--
does not know if she should.