Hair down to shoulder,
Gray peppers my sideburns;
Where do the years go?

With chisel and hammer
I carve the length of your legs
and the width of your waists
and the bend of your arms
and the ***** of your shoulders
until I arrive at your brain
where I reach with chisel and hammer
until I come across your spring
of wisdom and knowledge
your fountain of thought and belief.

If I could be the perfect me
I’d be a perfect poet.
My hair would be long and blue
And I wouldn’t need anyone. Not even you.
I’d be a little too skinny
With long, lanky legs.
And freckles. Oh, the freckles i’d have
If I was a perfect me.
My eyes would resemble spring
Clean cut grass.
Eye lashes like the stem of an Allium
And shoulders like a mountain;
cut and pale.
I wouldn’t have you in my veins
And nothing would mean anything.
I wouldn’t need your permission to breathe

Or to just be me.

*(r.e.)

I am, not be, something I can not see.
And it turns me tormented to face
my own reflection, over and over,
closer and closer, to cutting that nose
from my face. And laughing as I do so.
But instead he mimics my lack of conviction.
And he winds fictions of me falling slow,
trying to hold the curves of the world as I do so.  

Even Atlas' strength was humbled by it;
The weight of this world could never have
been on my shoulders. But thats where I feel it sits.
So selfish, so arrogant. I am but not be.
I do not ever tell of this weight on my neck.
Instead in quiet torture I find my own respect.

crying is a sign of being strong
and i am weak
like the shoulders that support me