You can’t make people be the composition notebooks or fast food napkins
for you to ink with your tribulations, triumphs, and tittering.

You can’t make people crawl into your head where those aroused thoughts
dust away the cobwebs with bamboo brooms.

You can’t make people feel the increased weight of your hand when
your heart wrenches in the middle of a painful line.

You can’t make people undergo the scratching of lead or the blurring of
their chicken-scratch existence with a single tear.

You can’t make people rest crumpled up on the floor or in the trash,
only to be retrieved later with regret and reflection.

You can’t make people wallow so deep in your quiet desperation to free
the feelings that well up in your heart and eyes.

You can’t make people understand precisely how you feel like all the
eloquent ways you can write about love and loss.

You can’t make people be the poems that listen to your secrets, but
you can write them a poem and for now, that’s enough.