Poetry isn’t something you smoke in secret.
It isn’t a drama struck on the tip of a match.
It is nothing at all
once the heart stops beating.

You don’t get to read me
as if you already know.
Not with that softened gaze,
not with lungs left hollow.

Poetry isn’t smoked—
yet somehow
you inhale it endlessly,
left with dizziness spun from metaphor,
with whirlwinds of silence
that burn,
or else
ache
quietly.