Female Writers: Beware [Poem]

FEMALE WRITERS:
Beware of the boy in the worn-down black suit,
slouching at your door like a defeated shadow.
“I used to be alive,” he says, “until death got more exciting.”
He’s a withered star, a burnt-out blaze.
He knows you’ll be a great writer someday if only you’ll
take his advice/cut your hair/write with a little more style/a little less style
He knows what art really is, Egon Schiele tattooed on his ribs.
He once beat a painter out in the parking lot of an art gallery
with a garden hose. He overdosed on the top of a parking ramp
and saw God slicing him on a cutting board.
But he’s too old for that shit now.
You, on the other hand.
He’ll open the cavity underneath his heart, and try to pull
you in.

Before he got to me
I remembered wanting to go to the sea.
The heavy pillars of water
rising to meet me, the moon being carried
on the back of a giant.
And it’d be cold but not cold enough,
as I pushed sand through my fingers,
as I crawled into a space
actually greater than me.

FEMALE WRITERS
do not get to slump down with serpent eyes,
wearing indignation like blazers. Wearing smoke like
an oxygen tank.
Didn’t you know, you don’t get to overdose on parking ramps,
beat men with garden hoses?
If you do, you’ll be just like him except sucked away
beaten down, used,
up and through.
Your talent is in your preservation,
like a porcelain thing untouched by ash and by
wind and the breathy, excited sighs of people
who don’t understand you like him.

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