vi. search and discovery

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you know they say hearing a mother

speak her missing child’s name over and over on tv

actually helps the abductor

see the child as a person rather than an object,

and that makes me wonder if when i repeat my own name countless times in my head each day,

if maybe it’s really just a silent plea for me

to go out and find myself

in the sea of Jane Doe that have yet to be discovered

because i have been missing since that day in the library,

when a friendly stranger found me in the poetry section

and he watched as i etched each poet’s name

into my poor skin,

because they were more deserving of the life

that i possessed than i was

and this stranger told me stories of his late wife,

who had been a poet herself,

only she scribbled obituaries on the bottoms of her shoes

instead of in the corners of her calculus tests,

and she tucked them under her bed when she was done

so that they could live where all the other monsters hid,

for they feared the dark and the unknown even more than she did

and he said that the main difference between his wife,

Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Virginia Woolf

was that her sadness did not eat her up and spit her back out,

like their sadness did them,

but rather,

it remained hidden in a slice of her mind,

in a corner of her bones and sliver of her soul,

a cruel and twisted constant that she grew accustomed to

over the years

until it finally just overtook her body and made its home in her

but what i didn’t tell him was that sometimes i can understand

why Sylvia Plath put her head in an oven;

because there are so many things in my head

that i would like to catch fire every now and then as well

when i was younger,

i always thought i wanted to write myself a better story,

but it turns out all i really wanted to write was

a better me

and maybe that’s what poetry is,

trying not to hate yourself too much

while your write yourself into better stories

just so you can be the hero for once

occasionally i am gone for days at a time

and my friends are tempted to call the police

and file a missing person’s report,

even though i am right there,

still standing right beside them,

still eating  my day old lunch at the same table,

but they say my eyes are like an empty house

in winter,

with the lights left on

simply to scare away unwanted intruders

but i think my friends forget that there’s no point

in filing a missing person’s report on someone

who has been gone for years

because sometimes people are just so lost

that they don’t want to be found.

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