Your blood was laced
with poetry
though you rarely admitted it.
From time to time, you’d open
a vein
letters spilling all over the page
worlds
where you longed to be free.
You broke loose one day
preserving your verse
on a thick scroll of black cord.
Allen, was your heart pumping
poem
against bone against flesh?
Were you trying to revise, re-write,
re-make yourself?
Noosing those words around your neck,
were you daring the lines
to catch you
seconds before you would have
hit the bathroom floor?
Alyss 