Think About It.

I'm being ruthless with my writing again;
slitting open lines like tissues and transplanting
them onto paper plates,
cradling nouns gingerly in my palm
as if they were someone's heart or kidneys
(hot and still [dimly] pumping).
I'm a writer, not a surgeon:
I may not be able to clear ventricles and
remove tumors,
but I can preserve the people I love in the pages
of my notebook, press words like decaying flowers between
my palms.
I may not be a surgeon, but I can save people.

They called me a pretentious bitch;
a nerd without even the common courteously to
wear glasses (so I can at least look intelligent.)
Apparently, formulating an atypical lexicon and
utilizing a dictionary makes you a freak.
They hate that I know the difference between breath and breathe
off the top of my head (one is a verb and the other is a noun, idiots.)

I'm sitting in a lawn chair watching the rain pour
beyond the edge of my shelter;
drawing a shivering hand through my hair
and breathing out a hot breath of steam into the air.
With my sticky red pen, I make another incision in the paper;
angrily crossing out whole sections, and scribbling out adjectives,
because no one nowadays wants to read all those extra words
that I love so dearly.
I am only a writer after all.

I'm just a freakish little girl who once
read the dictionary cover-to-cover,
and speaks like an english teacher: spinning similes
around her pinkie finger.
I'm just a pretentious bitch
who says things like "the banality of evil"
and "the timbre of your instrument is aesthetically-pleasing";
who straddles the line between
reality and insanity like a funambulist,
because sometimes she forgets how to spell judgement (judgment),
but can easily define hypertrophy cardiomyopathy
because she wrote a fucking poem about it.
I am just a writer
who uses manifold words to convey
acute things.
I write with obscure references
and carry a thesaurus in my back pocket,
but I've realized that I just don't care.

I'm hanging upside down from my roof
to get a different perspective on the ground
and all the cerebrospinal fluid is rushing to my head;
tomorrow I will teach myself to write with my right hand
so I can be ambidextrous (and write twice as fast),
and I don't care if that's weird.
It's who I am,
and I don't care about your floccinaucinihilipilification
(yes, I can use that in a sentence and in relation to you),
because you consider words to be weightless
in a world where language is the focal point of
existence.