I don’t like Poetry.

So I reject her at every turn.

With every fiber of my exhausted being.

But she craves that sort of thing.

Stubborn Poetry. Blossoms in both sunlight and shade.

I detest how she makes me feel.

Or how she forces me to feel.

Or the ways she feels about me.

Or the places she makes me travel when we’re alone together.

Or that she makes others openly feel in my direction.

Or that she’s so unshackled. And raw. Nonsensical and free.

Unencumbered by filters or structure and gleefully vulnerable.

All things I’d rather not be in my fragile and fleeting existence.

“Please, leave me be….” I beg her to no avail.

It irritates me that she wallows, with a tropical drink and a smile, in my bubbling emotions like a jacuzzi. The very emotions in which I meditate and medicate to escape.

“You know exactly what you’re doing…” I cry to her.

She’s a grappling hook dragging me kicking and screaming into the dammed, watery abyss located miles behind my cheeky smirk and dry, unblinking eyes.

The abyss where I once drowned daily in my truths and choked hourly on my self-awareness.

“I don’t need you,” I tell myself.

I recall swimming with boulders on my ankles to the surface with sinking shores where  I built a foundation on an island of sand and ashes. And it was necessary and great.

It was paradise. She knew it was paradise.

But yet she digs trenches in me so deep that they scrape the center of my earth and leave scab marks, tall like mountains and deep like caverns on my inner core.

“Why poetry?” I ask. “Why ignite my flame?”

Can you answer that for me, Poetry?

There’s no extinguishing a torch which was never lit. You could’ve left me cold and blind. Where it was safe.

Why conduct symphonies with my heartstrings?

At first Poetry is silent. But then she replies to me with a wavy reflection. Every time. With a f***ing reflection. She shines that distorted reflection of me with a wormhole in my chest the size of a collapsing star.

“This is why I despise you, Poetry…”

Because I can’t help but love you. You leave me no choice but to love you. A love so strong that it bleeds into bitter indignation for you and for myself for loving you.

You’re meant for me. And I’m meant for you.

Tethered through desire and longing.

Like half-buried roses with razor sharp thorns.

Escaping you is escaping myself. Which is an impossibility.

“But you knew that, didn’t you… Poetry.”