I am the author who can’t sell a poetry book, a goddamn architect of beautiful disasters building cathedrals nobody bothers to enter. I bleed metaphors onto paper, bury my dead in paragraphs, and drag the carcasses of my childhood through the printing press, only to watch the world scroll past like my words are another dead fly on a windowsill. I’ve swallowed enough rejection to shit out a library. My bookshelf is a graveyard of unsold dreams, every spine a headstone, every blank sales report another shovel of dirt. And still I write. Jesus Christ, I write.

I write like a lunatic setting fire to his own furniture just to see what the shadows look like. I write with ink under my fingernails and a cemetery rattling around in my rib cage. I’ve made love to language in the back alleys of broken promises, fucked around with punctuation until the sentences started bleeding, and given names to monsters that most people spend their entire lives pretending don’t exist. I’ve turned grief into architecture, loneliness into a crooked boulevard, and disappointment into a fucking ballroom where all my dead ambitions dance with their shoes on fire.

Meanwhile, the world is busy buying refrigerator-magnet wisdom from people who’ve mistaken a clever caption for a literary resurrection. Everyone wants a little heartbreak, provided it comes wrapped in pastel colors, a pretty font, and a reassuring reminder that tomorrow will be better. Nobody wants the ugly truth sitting at the kitchen table with its boots on, drinking cheap whiskey and explaining why the universe doesn’t give a damn about our carefully constructed dreams. Nobody wants the poetry that smells like cigarette smoke, wet pavement, hospital corridors, and the last breath of something that once believed in forever.

Maybe I’m too dark. Maybe my words have too many crooked teeth. Maybe I don’t know how to dress a wound in something fashionable enough to sell. I’ve never been particularly good at polishing the ugliness out of things. I prefer the rust, the bruises, the cracked windshield through which the whole goddamn world looks like a beautiful accident. I want my poetry to have dirt beneath its fingernails. I want it to stagger through a dive bar at three in the morning, arguing with God over a spilled drink and a lifetime of unanswered questions.

And there are days when I wonder whether I’m simply shouting into an abandoned warehouse, whether every book I’ve published is another message in a bottle washing up on a shore where nobody lives. I wonder how many more pages a man can fill before he starts mistaking the sound of his own heartbeat for applause. I’ve celebrated small victories in empty rooms, raised imaginary glasses to imaginary readers, and watched the numbers sit there like undertakers waiting for the next funeral.

But here’s the goddamn joke: I cannot seem to stop.

The words keep coming, unruly little bastards kicking down the doors of my imagination. They arrive in the shower, at red lights, in the middle of sleepless nights when the ceiling resembles an unfinished manuscript and the moon looks like a bad editor with a hangover. I write because the alternative is allowing all these ghosts to take up permanent residence inside me. I write because somewhere between the first sentence and the final period, the world briefly makes a crooked kind of sense.

So perhaps I’ll never be the bestselling poet. Perhaps my books will continue collecting dust while lesser sentences collect fortunes. Perhaps the only standing ovation I’ll ever receive will come from the radiator rattling in an empty room.

But I have never needed a bestseller list to tell me whether something is worth bleeding for.

I am the author who can’t sell a poetry book, but I am still here, still sharpening my sentences against the bones of yesterday, still turning the wreckage into something resembling art. And if nobody wants to read what I’ve written, that’s their fucking privilege.

I’ll just keep writing.

Because somewhere in this miserable, magnificent circus, there is still a poem I haven’t written, a truth I haven’t exposed, and a little piece of hell I haven’t yet managed to put into words.