Regarding kneecaps.

 

Perhaps I am delusional
as all artist are in life.
I write poems making color
out of black ink on white paper.

I write nothing out of feelings
that speak in silence, yet screaming
causing heart-pounding hallucinations
to the skin, rising thin hairs --
in love confessions.

Some say I play so loosely with this topic,
of tossing death and loneliness so often
back and forth onto a tennis court
you're watching.

Who am I if not a corpse that's rotting?

One day you will see me, unearthed,
my teeth, my arms, the shattered
kneeCAPS.

How much different is a poem,
laying in a bookshelf, a book open,
its pages reading, "death becomes us."

How offensive that you found my thoughts,
relating.

Truly, and I mean this,
you have yet to know me much entirely.

You call me names I have timely clarified.

You call me things, about words,
of poems I have long ago explained.

Have you never read me first?

The poems of a highschool romeo,
speaking to the world
how love is so damn beautiful,
it's hard to be so formal.

                -V I L L A N U E V A

04.14.22