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