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.