Inkblood Elegies

The poet’s wrist is a fault line

where verses slip through fissures, uninvited—

a tremor of consonants, vowels like loose teeth

gnawing at the silence.

I carve sonnets from cartilage,

let the prayer of my marrow rise

as smoke from the altar of my ribs.

This is no metaphor:

the page drinks what the body cannot keep.

Every metaphor is a bruise.

See how the ink clots in the hollows

where my voice once pooled?

I scab over syllables,

but the wound still hums

an old hymn—write, rewrite, bleed.

They say poetry is breath caught in a jar.

But mine is the gasp before the plunge,

the suspended scream of a bridge

between almost and too late.

I tried to write love once.

It came out crooked—a rose

with thorns that drew blood, not petals.

Now my veins bloom hyacinths,

their roots tangled in the unsaid.

My typewriter keys are teeth,

gnawing at the silence.

Each clack a bone breaking

to spill its marrow into rhythm.

The page starves for more.

At dawn, I collect shards of moonlight

to weave into couplets.

By noon, they dissolve—

ghost threads in a fist.

My dictionary is a graveyard.

I exhume verbs, dress them in skin,

send them staggering into the light.

They collapse under the weight

of their own resurrection.

This poem is no phoenix.

It’s a wounded sparrow dragging its anthem

across the sky’s blank parchment,

leaving a trail of feathers

that spell almost beautiful.

I keep writing anyway.

Hollowing my bones into quills,

dipping them in the night’s black iris.

The hemorrhage of meaning never stops—

a requiem in reverse.

Let them call it art:

this hemorrhage, this exquisite rot.

For here, in the ruin of ink,

every scar becomes a stanza,

every silence—a comma waiting to bleed.