At 5 in the morning,
the line about loneliness
from Bukowski’s poem is
stuck in the space between
my blood and my bones,
floating through my system
like I took it intravenously when
the truth is that I swallowed it
whole, when I was 5 years old and
my father asked why I was not outside
playing with the other children, I was
too busy digesting poetry to describe
how I felt, digging through dictionaries
instead of the dirt in the front yard.
There are some words that have
always been lodged deep inside of me,
like bullets creating black and blue rings
around bruises constantly, and with each
new day, I feel the sting of yet another
metaphor creep its way up my throat,
out my ears, from my fingers into the air,
onto the page, into someone else’s mouth,
heart, eyes— the words are my refuge,
they are also
what I am
escaping
from.
