I remember one day, the first day of school.

We had sat in hexagonal rows traversing floors of 

trampled marble. 

each student introducing themselves

jumping on a band-wagon of feelings past

a pile of rust.

One student had enounced:

“I like writing, and poetry.”

the words blew through my ears like 

knives cutting through silk membranes of bloody tissue.

What about me?

before, it had been me, 

me who wrangled towering monsters of phrases

who faceted expired diamonds of clichés

smelting the monster’s armor into a ring 

that i could gift to a page or a computer screen.

It was me. Everyone knew. 

But she had stolen the ring, she had smelted it into her own

her own wranglings of miniscule microbial resistance, 

what she called her own emotions

fields of lightning and electrosignals 

 dancing on circuits of mushy toothpaste.

the teacher was the circus master. She smiled,

deciding on which lion to whip.

“We’ll have to exploit your talent then!”

But what about me?

What about my mounds of dressed-up curdled metaphors and

wines of putrid similes with dustings of pepper and salt like

the strange calligraphy that i had used to gift them to myself.

I wish that i could have told her

‘come exploit my mines of emerald green,

my seas of poetic fuel beds and crude tears.’

‘come exploit my coal of dead black strokes’

‘my people hungry for someone to worship’

because there was nothing to exploit in mine.

just weak electronic signals of fallacy and

delusions like sea beds of dead moss.

My grandeur was smaller than her thinnest 

hair.

but i, younger than the pencil that i had freed 

from plastic packaging yesterday

convinced myself that she had still molded it

sharpened it

after my own

still-life of verses.