when i tell you that i’m obsessed with writing,
what i’m trying to tell you is that i’m messed up.
by messed up i mean my hair, my head, my mind,
my life, my books, my desk and my heart.
i mean that i like to assume that something is wrong
when everything is perfectly normal and fine.
i mean that i have to constantly regulate my breathing
and remind myself to let go of the
breath i’ve been holding in for too long because i was
staring… right through his soul.
my life is a car with the headlights smashed in and i can’t tell
where i am or where i’m going and even when i can finally see something
the words that live in my brain but never leave my lips
start to beanstalk up from the ground, shielding the road ahead.
so when i hit rock bottom and lose control, i can’t warn anyone to
stay away because the horn is broken.
i wake up in the middle of the night on my desk,
pens of all colors and papers of all sizes sprawled across the top
serving as a reminder of how much i’ve not written in the past six months,
ergo how much i have not been breathing for the past six months.
since the moon won’t let me go back to sleep the windows to my soul stay open
for five hours, and i write twenty poems in that three hundred minutes.
after writing the twenty poems i throw away eighteen of them
in the bin under my desk, where my unfinished projects are buried
but i never let mother empty that bin because i keep telling myself
one day i will finish those words and i will show them to the world.
i see things that other people don’t seem to notice – not ghosts, but rather, emotions.
and i wear long sleeved shirts because i have words all over my arms
that i can’t wash away because of the ink that has already found a home
on my skin, in my veins and in my blood.
i try so hard on stormy nights to make the flowers bloom
even though i know that i don’t know what i’m capable of.
i morph a make-believe world with the stick we call a pen
to blind my eyes from the ugly and dying world,
my lungs are filled with ideas, waiting to burst out of my ribcage,
but before that, my hands have to find the right words, the right fit,
like we’re in a game of scrabble, but there are no vowels.
and every day i try to write something inspiring, something that can
one day change the tiniest bit of the world, but i can’t.

so when i tell you that i’m obsessed with writing,
i mean that i didn’t choose the words.
the words chose me.