Walking through old words
I see the same ones
over and over and over
just rearranged
carefully scattered
and strung again
to avoid being caught
at being the same poem
I wrote a hundred times
if I wrote it even once.

It wasn’t very good.

As heavy and slow
as the number of times I wrote
“heavy” and “slow.”
“Beating hearts” and “blood in veins”
as tired as the word “tired” became.
“Wandering, disconnected, lost,
broken, seething, pooling, secrets, unspoken”
over and over and over
and yet
I fooled no one.

If I could write it again now
it would go like this:

I am afraid
I might be worthless.