Poetry is a language

I know best when I lose myself

when I am nothing but a mirage

of who I could have

should have been

before I choked on the ash of perfection and  

burnt myself to the ground  

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Some nights, the words flow easily across the page

like stars against the ink-black sky

reminding me that tragically beautiful  

is simply a poet’s term for desolation  

That the stars we wonder at  

are dying, burning to nothing. That

poetry is both a solace and a cage

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Despondency has a way of making itself a muse

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For I have loved the words so much

that they’ve absorbed me  

made me a slave to the ebbs and flows  

of sadness for the sake of an  

art I will always run home to

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I have forgotten to write of beauty  

have forgotten to write of wild lilacs  

in the forest, and the orange streaked sky  

at sunset. I have forgotten the balance of nature--

her seasons

her decay  

her bloom