Poetry Slam Screamer

Everything is wrong.  

The world is going to end 
before I write a poem worthy of 
the end of the world, and 
that’s worse than when I had 
cancer and found out about it 
when I peed blood into my toilet 
on the night Michelle Obama 
gave her speech at the 
Democratic National Convention.  

Worse than when 
the...

(REDACTED... for now)

                   ...be happy forever, and 
worse than when my first-born son
was given a death sentence, 
less than an hour after drawing breath.  

A poet’s inner monologue is trauma porn, 
looking for an audience to suffer it with.  

This isn’t the best poem 
I ever wrote.  It’s basically shit.  
It’s true, but shit nonetheless.  
And you need to know that 
when I started writing this, 
I had every intention for 
better than some 
fourth-runner-up-in-a-poetry-slam 
screamer.

I apologize for that.  
And if I ever read this 
in a coffee house, or 
lower-case-god forbid, on stage, 
in the spotlight, I promise 
to turn in my page poet card 
on the way out the door.
At least I was right when 
I said, 

everything is wrong.