Today.

Today, I don’t want to be a poet

Because poetry is

Love like melted chocolate

Sinking into the hard to reach

Cracks and crevices of the things that make a person human

Is galaxy eyes and

Wish I was sober Saturday nights

Poetry is wishing and hoping and praying

Nostalgia and broken dreams

The color of ink seeping through skin

Onto notebook pages

Today, I don’t want to be a poet

Because poets are more than skin deep

They feel things inside their bones

In places most can’t even reach

Today, I don’t want to feel darkness

Like it’s all I’ve ever known

Don’t want to cut myself open with a

Ballpoint pen

To bleed words only I can comprehend

Onto pages no one will ever read

Today, I don’t want to be a poet

Because music notes have left gauges on my skin

And instead of healing them

Writing only deepens the pain

Till I’ve got treble clef cuts

And consonance caverns in my body

When I speak, I can’t help but count syllables

Spit assonance angrily

Today, I don’t want to be a poet

Because no matter how loudly I scream

Or how heavy I bleed

The pain is still there

Constant like ink on paper,

Poetry is the home I didn’t ask for

But moved into anyway

Set my things down in the soft spaces

In between stanzas

Leave pieces of myself in each quatrain

Leave voicemail like similes

Sleep where metaphors lie because

Poetry is my home

But it is also my graveyard

Ink stains on my fingers, but blood stains on my coffin

Like Romeo and Juliet who found a home

Among the still faces of the dead

Mind and heart at war like Capulet and Montague

I hated that play

Maybe because it felt too familiar

Like Shakespeare reached into the inner workings of my soul

And played them like a melancholy ballad

Today I don’t want to be a poet

I don’t want to drown in the waters of my soul

Or burn up in the ashes of my sadness anymore

And god, isn’t it crazy that my vice is as simple as

Words on paper

But somehow it means so much more

Burns like whiskey down fragile throats

On stolen Sunday nights

And cigarette smoke curling in lungs

Like a savior

Penetrates till I bleed ink

Till I can’t help but sink back into the things

I told myself I’d never venture into again

Come back again and again

To a cure that only leaves me empty and lost

Leave everything on the page

When it might better to keep some things

Tucked close

Left with open wounds

Today I don’t want to be a poet

Because sometimes I feel music so deeply

That I tuck lyrics far inside of me

As if I’ll be able to keep them there

Even though the words leave cuts on my fingers

And the guitar chords taste like acid

In my mouth

Today, I don’t want to be poet

I want to feel things on the surface

See the world as simply as colors on a canvas

Stop speaking in metaphors

Wash away ink stains and let my bruises be

Feel as freely as my heart beating

In time with my mind

Find myself without drowning in galaxies

Sober instead of drunk

On poetry and prose

Tomorrow maybe I'll want to be a poet

But not today,

Not today.