will crawl out of the drain and try to kill you
like some 80s horror flick. The picture of us at the Santa Fe 
Railyard, foreheads glistening. The black widow creeping
from the mound of linens still warm from our bodies. Mechanical
hum of crickets when you push into me in the middle of the night, when 
I can’t sleep and the years replay like a foreign movie, a terrible one 
where the voices sound underwater. Failed poems will steal 
your breath when you wake parched, hungover, emptied
in a room full of the steady buzz of the refrigerator. 
When all that excites you is momentary, an earthquake in which 
all the books shake in place, and nothing falls. No one ever reads 
failed poems, but they follow you home in the dark and tuck in 
beside you. Failed poems are cute grim reapers that live in cartoon snowcaps. 
They’re midnight döner kebabs that give you heartburn. 
Once, in Zurich, we were served rabbit paella at a party 
celebrating an exhibition of an artist from Venice Beach 
who used to be homeless but drinks $25 Erewhon smoothies and paints 
hundreds maybe thousands of happy faces with his feet. His canvasses 
go for $25,000. Toe paintings are better or at least significantly 
more profitable than failed poems. Failed poems won’t help you 
earn a living. You will probably have to do freelance marketing 
to sustain the creation of failed poems. Failed poems accrue interest. 
They seep into dreams where all your friends line up to blow 
your husband. They cost a monthly cloud subscription to maintain. 
Failed poems are injected into your father’s veins when he ODs 
for the second time this year. They’re shared to infinity 
when you’re canceled for fringe political views. When you’re six
feet under, a failed poem is written on your head. It’s a prayer 
in the form of a failed poem, the last words 
you hear on earth