The Poet
Location
A poet wears no badge,
nor hat with "literate"
scrawled across it,
nor x-ray glasses with which
to examine all inequities
in every passerby passing by
A poet wears a mask,
long sleeves cover up
heart tattoos along their arms,
crossed out names of
ex-lovers weigh on their back
But the poet is only half
of the person,
deformed,
chest cavity agape,
ribs twisted outward
with a black hole in the center
The other half of the person
sits before them on a page,
the porcelain form of
what was once sacred,
now covered in ink,
cracked, broken, wasted
The poet is a cartographer,
mapping every curve, tip and edge
of the shards on the table,
then puts them back together
with a self-help hot glue gun
And when the cracks are sealed
and the black hole filled
the mask slides off
and the sleeves roll up
Eventually another will run fingers along
the cracks in the porcelain, the small and the long
they'll tattoo their name on the poet's right shoulder
and tell them to "Catch," right after "It's over"
The mask goes back on as the heart hits the ground
and the glue comes apart as the sleeves roll back down
another name crossed, another burden to bear,
another who could not treat porcelain with care