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Not Writing


by XXXX


I don't look like other poets. 
People hardly believe it when I say 
"I write poetry, sometimes.
    During lonely evenings."
Did I write that line, or did I dream it?
My allergy medication makes me sleepy,
gives me tactile dreams.
In any case: there is nothing else to do,
no one else to talk to,
but myself, in verse. 

Today, I accounted for every gift I've given him.
While poking at the calculator, I realized
I do not love him anymore. 
On my sheets, he is now just an outlay,
an expensive habit: smoking, drugs, alcohol, preferable
to chasing boys to get between their legs,
for them come between yours, once in a while,
after some persuasion, sob stories of 
loneliness, deprivation, sadness.

No other poems, except about boys.
What ever happened to literariness,
to high seriousness?

Fucked out of me. 

March 2013: Decided to pen something up again
after two years of thinking words were unkind to me. 

Sometimes I wish you'd love someone like me:
a stuttering, shameful trainwreck of a queer,
So I sit here trying to write poems all day 
and nothing. 
Whatever it was that allowed me to do what I did,
it's gone, maybe forever. 
I have said everything, and meant everything. 

I used these words to wash me clean.
Now, not a single blemish remains.
Only my natural ugliness, 
hideous as the day I was born. 
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