Happpy

Yesterday I bought a gumball
out of the machine.
It came out pink, but I referred red,
I stuffed it into my pocket, then into my mouth, onto the bottom of my chair,
its taste danced on its tippee toes, pirouettes
playing hopscotch with my heart.
I laughed, like it was Christmas in September.

I am afraid of poetry

I am afraid of poetry,
I no longer crave its existence,

I am scared of its existance

afraid of its silence

poetry breaks me-

I am collapsing--

a pit, a pile of bones, 

empty,

afraid of spilling metaphors that remain nothing more than the words I give it, 

there is a storm in my mind--

I am falling. 

Poetry, 

the reason he tosses off his seatbelt, does not fear the crash

why she dives into an ocean so big she becomes it, 

Poetry leaves me crumbling, tossed into the fire, dissolving into the empty air above, 

But I suppose I am just too broken to make sense, meaning out of anything, make poetry

Poetry is the sky above me, heavy, surrounding me,   

chaining me down under heavy train tracks 

And 

I can,

I can, 

I can, 

I can --

but the floor of the sky fell out. 

girl

girl, mouth as cold as silence, 

more terrified of cursing strangers than family,  

spits words out of her steamed tongue,

crafted to carry hurt heavier than forgiveness, 

tears apart her mother's arguments, 

with the kind of insults she had to love someone hard enough to learn how to use, 

to be unmoved, just okay with her destruction.