POEMS

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Kylo's in MOM is... poetry, and he actually does it. Specifically, he writes for The Verse Hearse, a dark, brooding poetry zine. He writes mostly melodramatic blank verse and occasionally performs his work. HERE ARE SOME OF HIS POEMS because you know you need them. They're pretty much always untitled.

i.

Walk with me in the dark.
I know the way.

I will not let you stumble.

I will not be your light,
For there is no light
 that can reach the place you must go,
the place I most wish to take you.

But I will be your guide.

Bring nothing with you.
You cannot climb
 with hands full of the past.

Don't be afraid.
You don't belong to it as I do.
It will touch you but not change you,
it will taste you but not claim you.

I won't allow it.

Come.
Know the dark.
It is all I have to offer,
but it is mine,
 it is only mine,

and I will share it with you.

ii.

They told me I should take my thoughts,
All the broken things
that scuttle away in the morning and hide,
Every monster I have ever made
from the remnants of dreams stitched together,
 My failures,
 My secrets,
and spread them out on paper.

And at once I saw them laid out in rows,
Draped in white.

Bring out the dead.

iii.

The dead cannot return.
We know this truth as gravity:
That which slips through our fingers falls to the ground
 if we let it–
 and we must.
The dead do not belong to us.

But we are theirs
when we believe that there is more
 that we could give
 to earn more than what is left.
We are theirs
in an instant left unguarded
when we forget they wait to speak with our mouths
 if we let them.
But the dead cannot return.

 How could they
 when we will not let them leave

iv.

How absurd
 the notion
 that this hole could be filled
with anything but what belonged there,
 as if it doesn’t know.

And I may be a monster,
 but I have never demanded
 a child be buried alive
because I tire of its screaming.

I will make you hear it.

It will not be silenced
 by the torrent of soft words
 poured down its throat,
It will reject them as poison,
 the wrong kind of blood.

It will cough them up, choking,
 a mouth full of ash and dirt,
 tear-streaked and furious:

Not these.

I need, I needed,
 I need, still,
the shape of it,
preserved if only by outline.

And I know
I have lost the river.

but it was mine,
 it was mine,
 it was mine,
and you will leave me the canyon.