wanted to be a poem,
but no one wrote for me.
So I took things
in my own hands.
And the more I wrote
about myself,
the more of me
began to disappear.
It felt like admiring
my own skin-
then peeling it off,
layer by layer,
until I stood
on the carcass
of what I once was.
A strange spectacle-
this naked admiration
and quiet disgust,
coexisting without conflict.
So I kept writing more.
Not to be understood,
but to see
how much of me
could be translated
before nothing remained.
And now, what’s left
doesn’t resemble a
person-
Just lines. Fragments.
A voice that sounds
like me but isn’t.
Maybe this is what
becoming a poem means.
Not being written,
but being reduced
to something
that can be read,
and felt like the waft
of an evening breeze.