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# I don’t want to be poetic
- URL: https://www.fsm.ink/i-dont-want-to-be-poetic/
- Published: 2026-06-26T16:00:30.000Z
- Updated: 2026-06-26T16:00:30.000Z
- Author: Annabella Dlugi
- Tags: Poetry, #Import 2026-08-03 09:59

*by Annabella Dlugi*

I don’t want to be poetic  
Instead, I’d like to scream and cry and  
Show you my guts maybe  
My intestines, maybe my brain will  
Convince you how wormy and tangled and  
Wild I am or maybe I should show you  
My credit score my too perfect grades  
My ocd thoughts of whether I brushed my teeth  
Took my meds locked the door put on lotion  
I don’t want to write a poem  
Right now I want to catapult into a river like a  
Rock when you throw it off a bridge as a child having fun  
I want you to feel the mess that I am between your  
Fingers, squishing behind your fingernails and stained  
On your favorite t-shirt like a forgotten wine  
I want to be inescapable in your mind but instead  
I wind myself up like a toy and the child playing with me  
Moves on and finds another before letting me spin like a top  
Across the table, with all the eyes and attention on me.  
I want to be seen and known and a poem only hides and enhances  
Something that was already beautiful but I want to make  
The ugly and muddy and chipped paint and rats in the trash  
I think somehow in my life I was so intrinsically happy and  
Maybe I don’t know how to be sad or mad or so deeply afraid.  
I don’t want to be poetic or lie and fit myself into a rhyme scheme  
Someone else made I would rather return to the  
River and rain and the women that make me alive.

> Annabella Dlugi is a recent graduate of Lawrence University where she studied English. She loves all things art, especially theatre and music, and is fueled by obscene amounts of coffee, friends, and water walks.