Why write poetry?

Why bother at all?

Now, it might seem like it's going to rhyme

like I just stepped out of a story book,

but it's not going to tinkle;

it's not going to be pretty

because this ink is my blood.

I haven't got to be nice.

i don't have to conform to Structure & consistency

No margins can touch me in my free form trance of pseudo-universal being.

I can say what I like

and some lofty high-nosed idiot will call it art,

but I just call it me,

this ink in my blood.

I can express my rage

when Mother throws away

the one momento I had of my childhood friend who moved to Japan

and it's gone and I want to rip apart the fabric of reality.

I don't deserve this.

I feel the liquid fire everywhere

in my inky blood and bloody ink.

I can be eloquent, too,

if I want you to know the anguish

that is more tears and self-pity than the last stanza

when my friends talked behind me

and laughed

when I cried on the school steps.

That time,

my blood ink was salty.

And sometimes

I just need to tell you how magnificent my feeling of euphoria

gets when I smile at a stranger;

when his lips twitch;

when her eyes crinkle.

I feel on top of the world

and I control it all like puppets

with the ink I made with my blood.

Just like when my piano teacher

tells me to take my feeling from my back

down my arms through channels

of wrists and fingers and soul;

so does my speech

run down and down and down and down

until I'm not sure where

the blood and ink combined.

I look down.

I see meaningless words

the world can easily scrap and erase.

I know what I lost, though.

A pint of faith, despair and hopelessness and infernos.

I cut myself open

and pour ink from my blood.