What if I told you that poets were overrated?

Someone who can only write when they’re sad,

Or in love or in bliss or in need of desperate rent money,

Is like a flower that only drinks from a tsunami.

Like a lake that only fills when the life it supports,

Is on its last breath.

We are vampires of misery and ecstasy,

and with our feasting, 

we create an eloquent hybrid of sorts.

 

It’s not natural to grow accustomed to

dragging your tombstone behind you with one hand,

And a paper and pen in the other.

But it is all we become. A rope around your neck traded in for 

tears falling in single letters and sobs escaping in meter.

Who knew hurting could create such beauty.

Who knew it could make me this angry.

 

Crumpled paper with trial and error inked between thin blue lines

Replace hands you’re too scared to hold.

Each rip of a page an “I love you”,

that fell from mouths too long ago to

mean anything now.

Do you blame the world?

 

No.

In a society where we ask, “What is the universe?

Why is it here?

Why does it hurt me so?"

I wish I could be the one who looks at the stars,

and thank them for not lighting my way,

and for letting me pave that path myself.

 

I have grown weary from years of screaming nothing into a sky,

that has given me everything I needed all along.

In the end, no matter how many words spill out of my eyes

and my shrieking mouth,

the world will always have been the poet,

And I will have always been its poem.