revisionalry

I wonder if I should
                                 send my poem to you,
                                                                      Ella

   .

imagine
every'neI've
ever
   written
      a poem about

reading
             about
                       themselves

and knowing
                      all their own

secrets,
and

maybe that's why I 

                                           

                                                  (of course it's why I)

,why I                                    

tipped you off, Nicholas

                            because 

                           I wanted

                                     to

I wanted

you

to

know

the things

you didn't know

I 

knew you didn't

know

I knew about you

\ so 

that in 

twenty seventeen

I could write poems about

yearning 

about you

forever

whilst being

perfectly

happy

in love.

in the first line of a poem

in the first line of a poem
there's so much
pressure
              \
                anxiety
to grab you, reader --
especially after
eight hundred
and
     no one
                even
                       reads them
                             
     anyway.

atrophied

when I feel the kinetic energy
accumulating in my joints
and near bursting from the corners of my salted eyes
then, I think of

all those women
who were kept quiet in their bodies
their wind knitted down under their
crinolines and corsets

who never raced through the mud
on bare feet, a hundred miles
who never got into a war
who never beat their best friend

who never smashed their knees into the pavement
or bent their bones over tree branches

who maybe, at best, felt their own way through the darkness

(like I've found myself clawing through
at odd afternoon intervals
in lieu of evening solitude
or actual intimacy, culled
by adultly exhaustion)

all those women
whose flesh was held still
against their own wanting --

how tragic it is
how shameful is it
that they have not felt their own blood
causing through their own veins

that they shall lie dormant
when they could be beautifully volatile