Nothing

This is something that isn't anything.

This is where I ask a boy why he would let me think we could love each other.

This is where I wonder what reality is, because someone has deconstructed it. And everything. With single words, with "I can't talk about this now."

This is the moment when I wonder why any of us are where we are, because why are we why, because when are we when, because what are we?

What!?

This is nothing.

This is where I stop letting myself love.

This is where you break my heart...

where my heart breaks all which loves it.

This is something and nothing and everyone who knows what I have not yet been allowed to understand.

This is conspiracy.

This is dogma.

This is life.

This is.

I don't know what is tonight. The things I believed are no longer believable.

This is a man sleeping on a mattress. This is a girl waking in the night.

This is a boy not knowing what love is.

This is a girl who is not the boy's own to love.

This is how a girl hates him for no promise he made.

This is nothing.

This is everything.

Relationship. Words exchange.

This is no poem; this is no cry.

This is what falls out of my mouth as I think about carelessness and novels and song lyrics, the mix CDs made for me, and the city streets I cannot face, for love has paved them, and I do not seal its tar.

I am forbidden from the paths the men have laid. I am restricted from the asphalt under my feet.

This is nothing.

So on I'll drift to nothing else.

I Wore an Emerald Gown

When I grew up, I tried to use my words,
spewed them from spoken to heard.
But they fell out like ugly music and flat champagne.
So with that we toasted abilities of the insane
and loyalties of the dead at the filthy brink
of the secrets we eat and the messes we drink.

Gowns and tuxedos floated charmingly by
but pearls and diamonds had no draw for mine eye.
Then with golden ales and foaming brews,
I let my lips fly with things about truths—
those were ugly green stories in oak tree waves
so after midnight toasts, I was branch-bound for days.

In the new year I remembered my words—
I fought to prove them truths to be heard.