Status Updates From When You Ask Me Where I'm G...

but my skin was a siren
that was always too loud.

if the words are a
hollowed vessel of what was once a tree growing
within you. if the words are expensive, but leave you
empty when they are not draped across your neck. if
the words are a red heart, a double tap, a closed fist
with a raised thumb. if the words are a responsibility,
a burden, a curse, a dying thing. if the words do not
free you, why do you hold on to them?

if the words hold you hostage, both refusing to
be spoken and refusing to let you leave. if the words
feel like burden, no longer art but obligation. if the
words are a cement cage, forcing you to move only
in endless circles. if the words are an elaborate
arrangement of plates but you are not hungry. if the
words are a butcher’s knife, cutting too deep into all
the parts of you that are tender

if the words are expensive, but leave you
empty when they are not draped across your neck.

i am cynical but i am also
desperate.

Depression is this ghost that looms over my shoulder and nobody seems to believe in spirits

there is no way
to live in a body
on an earth
in a universe
this complex
and not carry
questions in
your pockets
like accumulated
change
i have come to fear
my lack of answers
far less than humans
who claim to have
them all

i am told to stop
thinking so much
and i wonder why
it is that in order to
survive in this world
i must not use
my mind.

i have often known
the heaviest hearts
to recite the lightest words
and the burdenless
do not understand
that to dive headfirst
into oceans like ours
is to surely drown
so we skim the surface
and fill pages to become empty
and tie up our stories carefully
and do not unravel
because minds like these
are not easily stitched back together
when torn at the seams

does water remember
when she is stilled into
silence
all the ways that she can
strangle and devour?
does she recall
when she is vengeful
all the ways that she can
pour life into the aching?

instead of calling for help
we learned to carry the weight
of all these secrets on our shoulders
absorbing pressure in glass-jar bodies
hoping no one would notice.

apologizes for the actions of his fist.
hates his boss but always manages to
swallow his rage and smile.
she wonders how it could be
that she is the only one
who makes him
lose control

don’t get me wrong.
forgiveness and i are well acquainted
but just because she had good intentions
it doesn’t mean she ever kept me safe.

on those velvet black nights, when there is only anger in place of poetry, i will paint the walls with my knuckles. my mourning doesn’t know how to sanctify itself. how to dress itself in figurative language and present itself as an aesthetic. the tragedies between these words know how to thunder not only in metaphor.

some of the men
pray for you
prey on you
pray that god will save you
prey that god will break you
pray that they never marry women like you
prey that they tame women like you
pray that their daughters never hear you
prey that their daughters sound nothing like
their mothers

and i show you all the ocean
in my intentions. all the untamed
tides beneath my tongue that will
swallow you before you ever
attempt to master them.

you tell me to take a seat here.
on this pedestal that you have
carefully constructed only to
pull the wooden legs out from
beneath my body when my
mouth no longer forms
the words of your choosing.
you tell me to radiate.
how to radiate.

i am not your poem.
i was never your brushstroke.
i am not your tragedy
or your failed attempts to find meaning.
i was never an answer to a question
so when you ask me like dawn
if i will rise to your occasion
do not be disappointed when i reply
with the dusk that is all i’ve ever known.

the next time you ask me where i’m going
please recall that i am three parts indecision
and one part reckless abandon
that i have seldom bothered to look back
at the wreckage i’ve left in my wake and
will never be bothered to master the flames
at my fingertips anyways

he doesn’t care about politics and i wonder if he can see
the political boundaries on my body—the conflict zones
between my shoulder blades. the border built between my
tongue and me. the partition carved into my palms. all the
ways in which it is political for me to live.

sit in bookstores cross-legged at the
bottom of the shelves. love too many of the books and
take none of them home. your lines don’t usually fill up

always have the right words and seldom has them in
the right order. your commas pretend to be periods
and your metaphors sometimes spill over the edges of
convention

they taught her that
hell existed at the curve
of her waist.

i’m trying to come home to myself
i really am
but you underestimate the wayeyes
can knock on doors and break through
windows and tear down foundations
how eyes can whisper and laugh
and scream
you underestimate the way hate
can pull me to tears and push me to leave
once again.

so roop stares into the bathroom mirror and
prepares her face for a fistfight. the foundation
is two shades too light

Help I’m on a poetry kick and can’t stop