I am sick of writing about loneliness and oceans and insanity.

There should be more. A real poet would have more. 

So back against the wall, eyes open in the dark, moonlight bright on the backs of my hands, I am writing to her

I forge my own signature over and over every day, forgetting each morning how to be the same kind of sad I was last night

`I am allowed to feel terrible but never to speak of it.`

I am a house with boarded up windows, and I am the cracks in those boards that the sunlight escapes into

Sweet relief when the stars come back for me, one mother I have never lied to

That body of water I cannot mention for fear she will abandon me, full of salt and drying on her beaches, is screaming. I think the ocean is a woman because a man could never take that much rage and still come kiss our feet so softly

I am afraid of the way the gutters fill with water because if I was born as an ant I would be drowning, and I know that I am not, but the thought of what could have been eats at my lungs until they are carvings of a much older girl.

I am not going to mention that feeling you get in the gunshot wound of night, with the moon dripping her blood all over us, blind and hidden in the same room, the catacombs of Paris could scarcely hold a fear like this, but I do, right here under my sternum, forgotten like the baseboards of the house you grew up in.

I will not talk about the way you get when, unflinching and frozen, you ask me what is wrong because you care, and I have never, not once, asked her that myself. 

I am allergic to the feeling of rocks underfoot and yet I dream of the grand canyon and running barefoot over her arms, outstretched and trembling. 

A real poet would be louder with less words, she wouldn’t fight in her head, war weapons and gas masks down, she could breathe. 

But when I drown, just know that I am clapping for her. Buried in the ocean, loneliness in hand, I will listen for her ringing insanity.