i am sorry if i am not what you expected.
i am sorry if i am not slender or cunning or sticking to the schedule or falling into the precision of appointments and the rules of poetry. i am sorry if i am wringing my fingers dry and running out of paper and bleeding ink through my eyelids. i am sorry if i am butchering words and stitching their bleeding pieces into something i can lie and call beautiful. i am sorry that i can’t stick to your grammar, your syntax, your expectations, your rules. i am sorry, i tried.
i can’t help that i am running barefoot through the grocery store because i forgot my shoes or that i am driving through the fast food drive-through without buying a thing because it at least feels like i’m driving somewhere. i can’t help that i am forgetting to bring you home your medication and sleeping with my back against the grass and tying your requests together to knit a scarf to choke myself with. i can’t help it.
i wish i was different. i wish i was sticking myself in corsets and drawing the strings until i am coherent enough to bring my face out of the water. i wish i wasn’t skipping classes and forgetting to punctuate and writing things that don’t mean a thing at all on the palm of my hand. i wish i wasn’t falling in love with the wrong guy and ignoring the rest and treating my friends like fall leaves under my heel. i wish i was something else.
but i’ll never change the fact that i am a eroding mess, that i have carbonated anxiety bubbling in my arteries, that i am failing where so many before have succeeded. i’ll never change the fact that i am building my dreams on the trembling back of my weak words when i should be taking the brick and stone of an education and a job. i’ll never change the fact that i get lost in dreams without a map because i think a map takes the magic out of everything. i’ll never change.
i will always spend too much time wandering the aisle of book stores because i never feel more alive than when i am running a finger down paper spines. i will always be ten minutes late, two octaves higher than pleasing, incoherent, hopeless, unrealistic and reckless. i will always waste your time, waste my breath, waste everything.
i’m sorry, but i will always run barefoot through wheat fields.
and i will always see a waving sea of amber, not nutrition and paychecks.
i can’t be anything else but what i am.
