I read a poem,

              somewhere,
                              once.

Nothing like a wounded person's need for another wound,
or something like that.

And then again,
You longed to be bandaged before you'd even been cut

Maybe, maybe
But maybe I've collected scars
that never got bandaged
and I'm hoping someone,
somewhere,
will notice them just
                                      once.
                                     
And mostly, I've forgotten their
entire existence,
but sometimes,
sometimes.

I've never been great
with metaphors and words
stumbling over my tongue and my pencil
nothing flows easily with me
And yet, still
sometimes my words: a storm
sometimes my words: a drop in a puddle

I spent two weeks in my attic room
scraping away black underlayment
getting rid of my soiled carpet
but once it was good enough to invite you in
I should have locked the door and bolted it

Mostly what I'm saying is
everything I do is a shot in the dark
and Missouri is a long way to be shooting
when I only learned my north from south
and east from west in the eighth
grade.
Mostly what I'm saying is I'm
peeling back these layers of underlayment
and you're saying
I'm glad you trust me with this stuff
But I'm thinking of the layers and layers of subflooring
I've left to go