and you tell me
ive done well
when where
my head was left
with the dead dandelion
on the bench out
side the art
gallery
where no
one sits i sat there

Thoughts splattered across the page,
broken fragments scatter the paper
in one thousand causalities of war.
Yellowed teeth and dying poinsettias
become hope and hatred.
Everything awful becomes
beautiful,
and the poet wheezes
through a cloud of metaphors,
his sight distorted by the haze
of clauses.
He can no longer identify
what is real,
what is symbolism,
what is a painful memory,
what is so rhythmically pleasing that people
will repeat it in anthologies
20 years later.

They'll say, "Women are beautiful, like books." They'll thumb through, gently turning the pages, smelling the worn pulp, being careful not to hurt the old and exhausted spine. They'll say, "Beautiful.. aren't they just beautiful?" before placing the unread books back on their neatly lined shelves. Kant and Lawrence and Morrison will line either side of the fireplace for the next twelve years, and the homeowner will recline and sigh and think about how elegant their space looks lined with hardbacks and plays. And all across America libraries will lose funding because books are beautiful. Because they make a home feel full. Because the pages are old and perfect, unread, untouched, unloved, unopened vaults of ideas that can only be preserved through concept, potentially brilliant and bound in untouched beauty. Women are. Beautiful books.

I write because when I speak, I don’t.
My words are lost in translation
And it seems only my smile is being communicated.
Sometimes it feels too soft.

I write because next year I will be a nursing student.
And I will look into the eyes of a dying daughter,
46 years old with a blood pressure of 82 over 50,
And I will smile with, “how was breakfast?”

I write because I speak a dead language.
Studying and learning my culture,
Neither will help you become fluent,
Because these questions aren’t meant to have answers.

I write because I work in fast food,
And when I greet a customer with “How are you?”
He replies with his order, not his state of being,
While I punch buttons on a screen.

I write because I am mute.
Noises and phonemes echo in my mouth,
Almost constantly, in fact,
But it seems that I am never speaking.