What if the people in this room were the pages upon which we wrote: documented with our travels, or inscribed with our beliefs. Our stories, once secrets, become legible. We carry them in heart to heart conversations both trivial and deep. We brainstorm, helping each other write the missing parts and next chapters with our actions as much as our words. We read those around us in the quiet company of our thoughts- our dreams- sometimes loosing ourselves in the blank spaces left by those we once loved. We look up briefly from our reading with renewed perspectives, and we move. Our hands both reach for the same pen at once to rewrite the narrative, passing late-night notes to each other if only to keep ourselves woke. We don’t name what we’ve written, but we sign our names at the bottom and call it ours for the time being. We are impermanent. Still, we leave our marks like fingerprints on the pages of each other -  happy thoughts and revision comments color coded in the margins- our own jam session hidden between the lines we stay writing with no idea or expectation of how it will sound in the end. We utter mysteries and we’re misunderstood, simplifying our confusion into basic metaphors or parables, so that those who pick up where we leave off can understand them, or find some common ground; some shared chapter. We borrow pens and finish each others’ sentences as we collapse on the same endings. Our dialogue subsides into unspoken movement: into silent eyes reading. We are campfire surrounded by the stories we stay telling — that without, we'd be left to scratch the indiscernible signs of love on cave walls for only the darkness to forget.

O, feckless dart of immeasurable delight!
Wouldst thou direct elsewhere your flight,
And refute my rival’s gentleman claim,
That he be immune to Cupid’s aim.

His smug sobriety remains intact,
His pages blithe and matter-of-fact,
Where my poor pen is inked with woe,
And ****** to hell by quiver and bow.

O, mischievous boy do grant my request!
Whether modest maid or comely *****,
His downfall ensured by one bold kiss,
Shoot low, shoot high, but do not miss.

pen,
paper,
late night,
crumpled.

coffee,
sip,
think,
draft.

writer's block
because of you.
overthinking
drown her.

Pen Can Write
Pen Can Draw
It Can Even Paint

Pen can fill Colours
In Shapes and Drawings
And in peoples Life too

Pen has Sympathy
Pen has Empathy
Pen has Emotions too

Pen can Heal
Make you feel
Calm and cool

Pen can save
It can control
The way we behave

Pen Can Fight
For your rights
And for others too

Pen can **** colours
From peoples life
And make it pretty hell

Pen can help you
****** poor's property
And make you very rich

Pen can throw
Culprit in Jail
Or can even grant him bail

Pen could be Cruel
Only needs some fuel
Then it could easily burn

Pen is Sharp
It can Cut and Wound
And Make you Bleed

But is it really the Pen
Or the Hand and Mind
Of one who uses the Pen

Pen is a Weapon
Pen is Lethal
So handle with care

My pen knows no shame
the paper doesn't judge

My secrets are metaphors.
The words are artfully arranged in alliteration
Or cautiously halted in
Enjambment so that they don't reveal themselves.

My secrets are anaphoric.
They are metonymic, swearing secrecy to the pen.
Sometimes they are synecdoches,
Begging, afraid, in rhyme for your attention again.

My secrets are anecdotes.
They write about themselves through personification.
This poem juxtaposes itself;
I've told you all of my secrets of secrecy-how ironic.