Young Writers Society

you have written over thirty poems
and not a single one has been about
yourself, even this one separated
by a second person narrating over
the cracks and threads (sutures) that
make up your life, because
it is far easier to pick at threads
than clean up the resulting blood that spills
(even though it creates the words
you spread over this page in the first place)
there are no threads you've placed
in your soul yourself; the only
thing left is scar tissue
in shades of grey with the odd
rainbow when you learned what your
flaws meant (but even then
the paintbrush was not in your hand
with another to steady your shaking one
as two filled in the colours)

you are nothing without others
and those poems are far more interesting

— April 30, 2014

encore (spinoff of a @Lumi title)

i write poems for two mistresses
love and sorrow, who refuse
confinement in anything but the
smallest, densest unit of emotion
the works that are anything but prose
and long enough to describe each
woman in snippets, most often
the touch of their lips or the feel
of their hand in mine, with one
enchanting as autumn's frost and the other
delicate like the first warmth of spring;
vivaldi plays in the background
like an overabundant metaphor,
the sentiment touching but meaning lost
as i write about the two mistresses
who take turns residing in my bed
forcing me to stay against november
or pushing me out into june
where they are both too intense
for me to stay silent

so i try to capture them
if only to distill a moment
out of nothing at all