Words catch me in their soft padded

net — no fear for falling

concrete skyscraper contracting

I want to have something it wants

I want it clawed out of me

every little opening of temporality

finds mismatched running shoes

my ragdoll teases me without sound

it rips out my pages

dumps them in its tray of spilling milk

until the words spike up like hairball

it coos, “the mind makes up lots of things

and not all of them should be on the page”

if I matter enough

or my heart does

I look through a prism on my desk

every press

of the secretly tallying finger

the palpitating heart

lights up sorrow’s way along darkened gravel paths

like rightful temper tantrums

like orange juice seeping

into a laptop with its short wires

tangled like webs of a calamity

piecing together secrets I don’t know I have

how strange then

wondrous

somewhere in the world where existence gets

folded up many many times

enraptured in the smell of library

like a world inside a camera

how iridescent

— waves of pain in the birth of words

recorded by somebody else that lives inside me

somebody with cat eyes

whom I trust

like twins on a rusted swing

Author Bio: Writing gives me a scalpel-like precision to dig out otherwise buried thoughts, a stage to sound out otherwise inexpressible thoughts. Among the vastness of writing’s universe, I find poetry in particularly to be the most fitting medium for thoughts, feelings and ideas that are unusual and absurd and strange, nonetheless, that which hold so much weight and materiality. With poetry, I can be precise but indirect, my ruminations concrete but abstract. I also post (now sporadically) my admittedly mediocre writing on my Insta @written.k ; I’m still very much learning and growing as a writer, and would appreciate immensely if we could connect on there!