Inkblood

The first time I bled ink,

it wasn’t romantic—

just trembling hands and a cracked Bic

scrawling curses on a napkin

while the waitress side-eyed my coffee refills.

But the veins, oh—

they hummed.

Some nights, the words arrive like uninvited storms,

lightning in the marrow, thunder in the teeth.

I chew them raw, spit them into notebooks

with edges frayed as my sanity.

“Poetry is the art of haunting,” she said—

the woman who left her verse in ashtrays

and wine-stained divorce papers.

I write in the hollows of 3 a.m.,

where shadows gnaw at the walls

and the ceiling fan ticks like a metronome.

My desk: a battlefield of crossed-out lines,

half-smoked wishes,

inkwells that sweat like tidal pools.

They say poets are surgeons of the soul—

but my fingers leave stains,

not sutures.

Each stanza a bruise I press to remember,

each metaphor a cracked mirror

where my face splinters into a thousand what-ifs.

Once, I tried to write a love poem.

It came out as a funeral dirge

for the boy who kissed me in a library aisle,

his hands dusted with the ghosts of overdue books.

“You taste like sonnets,” he lied.

I still find his syllables caught in my hair.

This is how it goes:

We gut ourselves on the page,

hang our entrails like festival garlands,

pretend the applause isn’t echo.

They’ll call it “free verse”

because freedom is just another cage

with prettier bars.

Yet here, in the wreckage of paragraphs,

I am alive—

a god of small destructions,

a beggar with a crown of asterisks.

Let the critics dissect my cadence,

my reckless enjambments,

the way I italicize silence

as if it could save me.