Running In My Veins

Sometimes I think it’s ink that runs through my veins instead of blood.

I breathe stories and colors instead of oxygen.

I find nourishment in the small gestures,

the connections and essence I watch people leave in my wake.

His hand lingers on his glass,

flirting with the whisky drops left, flickering in the candlelight.

She smiles at nothing in the dim light of the bar.

They trace the grain of the wood on the table to avoid the answers staring in their faces.

Moments, shared human lives, as we live,

blundering through this reality.

Here I find my calm. Satiated, centered, floating,

I pick up a pen, open a vein,

and begin to bleed.

I Am Not Made For Poetry

I am not made for poetry.

My prose will not break down to pieces,

hit the rhythm just right, to hell with rhyme.

The abstract, the limerick, it does nothing for me.

Couplets annoy me and the words are never quite… so

how then do you measure the beatings of a human heart

that races as you approach?

I have no clever witticisms for the color of your eyes

or the color of my warming face. Is there a word for

the color of the space between us? I would call it a

lonely, empty, a translucent shade of gray

keeping a chaste space between our colorful lives.

What a rainbow we would make. Or a rich earthy

brown set for our seeds to grow.

What seeds would we lay? A love and future? A wild growth

of our shared lines of a madman and a lady with a pen.

Quite a garden for characters like us. What stories we could write.

But not poetry.

No, I was not built for poetry.