I.
This is just another bad poem
Just vomited-thoughts-left-on-paper poem
This is a collection of grammatical errors
This would surely make my English teacher cringe
But no worries, I didn’t write this for her

II.
This bad poem is for you

May my subject and verb disagreement
remind you of all those misunderstandings that lead to raised voices
and nights where I cried myself to sleep

Sentence construction was never my strength, it still isn’t, maybe that’s why you never truly understood me—
called me difficult and bipolar
You said that I was too much

Did it ever occur to you that you might just misread me, like homonyms,
same words but with different meanings
misread my jealousy with accusations,
my concern for excessive affection

You said that I loved you too much
but darling, did you even love me at all?

Did I put too much meaning on your words,
turned them into similes and metaphors?
Turned your literal statements into figures of speech
You told me that you liked me,
so I blissfully interpreted it as a hyperbolic expression— called it love when obviously it wasn’t

III.
I was never good at using punctuations
I put too much commas,
unnecessary, misused, I kept trying to hold on
Afraid of the inevitable end,

Switched to semi-colons in an attempt to make it a few words longer

Because despite all our grammatical errors
no matter how shameful our piece of literature was to the English language

It was beautiful to the untrained eye,
To those who read poetry as it is
To those who don’t dig deep in search of true meaning behind the metaphors
It was beautiful to me

But I eventually learned that infinitives and infinities are different,
in spite of sharing infinite as the root word
Like our love,

started with something so promising
but unlike most novels,
there’s no happy ending

So I accepted defeat,
accepted the inevitable and bitter end
No more committing the same mistakes over and over again,
the same words over and over again,

Accepted the fact that synonyms existed,
words with the same meaning but also entirely different
new and unfamiliar, foreign and peculiar

IV.
I accepted defeat
No more commas or semi-colons
We have reached the couplet of our free formed sonnet—

I was never good with endings, I don’t think I’ll ever be,
So darling I hand you the pen, set us both free.

If my skin was white
Would I be safer?
Would my voice be louder?
And would my accomplishments be greater?
Would I matter?

Would I be allowed to live or is there no happiness?
Truthfully, I would not prefer the latter

I could go on for days of my woes
And the places I have found shelter
My music, my art, my poetry and how possibly they could be better

But they are my solace
They dont hush me and say *Shhh let's talk about your blackness later"

Mahal kita kaya gusto ko masaya ka

Kahit minsan nakakalimutan mo na ako
Kahit minsan gustong sumabog ng puso

Kahit minsan patuloy sa pag tulo ang mga luha
Kahit minsan hindi mo alam na ikaw ang laman ng aking sinusulat na tula

Kahit minsan wala kang oras sa akin
Kahit minsan sobrang sikip na sa damdamin

Kahit minsan manhid ka
Kahit minsan sobrang masakit na

Mahal kita kaya iintindihin kita
Masaya na akong masaya ka

Sometimes I smell your hair
and pretend to lay my
chest against you

like on those nights after
building  a pine  fence
around the yard

of  a Baptist preacher’s
house in Georgia
forty miles

from cold beer and café pie,
and then I remember that
was 20 years ago

before you and me
drove different
highways.

Scratches on the wall, each one a tiny indention of my life. The bars that I look through are not my prison. The thoughts inside my mind are what hold me. Remembering the tears of my children as I was lead away in chains. Hearing the screams of my mother as she disowned me in anger. Feeling the separation from the emotional ties that bound me closely with the ones that used to love me. Knowing that someone else is filling the void that I left in the wake of my incarceration. Each scratch in the wall, is a day off of my life. Each mark in the hard concrete reminds me of the things that I should have done. All I am doing is marking time, in a prison of my own making.