atlantic

poetry at midnight
is blue not faded denim,
not summer sky,
not stained glass

it’s the ocean past
 it’s cold like 
late january and crane beach in june
it’s numbing and it hurts like
you can feel
all your nerves at once

so…. i hang 
off the edge to feel 
the blood rush to my head
just to feel like 
i’m still real

twist words into pyrite,
foolish dreams into fool’s gold
i said today,
there’s something so 
beautifully ugly
about walking the line of
mediocre and great
i loved the way it sounded
i hated the cliché

it meant i never really know
what i want to say
i claw at my throat, towards
the light, fearing that the
sunlight of my
language is lost in
clouds of words

as ChatGPT clouds words like
fingerpaint, throws color
onto a blank wall as
the world calls it masterpiece

as the world calls it real

i kneel at the altar of a faceless Muse
and beg for one more verse, one more word, i
spent years of my life doing what
will it even amount to
when the world can’t tell the difference between me
and a robot? i’m

spent. years of my life and it’s
still not enough i pull poetry out of my
flesh and blood and bone, but
it’s not good enough so i will
pull until there’s nothing left
until the threads unravel
until the world calls my corpse masterpiece
until the world calls me real

until i have become
poetry, at midnight
visceral, fathoms deep,
lightning over the Atlantic

barely even here
part of me, drowning in melodies
part waking from dreams part
trying to speak