words

I can’t find my journal

Can’t find my vehicle for getting words to ink

So this will have to suffice

But see how even on screen I skip to the next line

Expecting the page to end

To meet the edge

What does that say?

That tapping and typing will do in a pinch

But I breathe words to life on blue and parchment

rather than blinking black on indifferent white light

There is a lot that I want today

I want to learn to be stronger

I want to do the hard things that will make me better

I want to stop hesitating

I want to burn bright in actions not just words

I wish I could write my future the way I write the lives of my characters

I want to live poetry so I don’t have to write it.

This is not a poem.

Sometimes I feel as though I am living in a whirlwind.

But the wind is stirred by everyone else but me

You are joining your lives with others

You are creating new lives

I am moving slowly while you all orbit around me

I could step into the circle, but I hesitate every time I see an opening

No, not yet.

Next time.

Maybe.

The only wrong choice is to not choose.

I can put the words in ink on my skin

I can say them in the mirror to myself

I can write them to you.

But it’s easier to find excuses to put them off

And go search for a lost object instead.

For Country

This is piece I wrote today in class after hearing about a friend who just passed away.
I didn't know him very well, but he was an amazing writer and had a contagiously bright personality.


BY the time I got the news, it was too late, and it's not like I could have done anything anyway, but once you were alive and present and once you were laughing and making us laugh and once you loved your mommas jumbalaya and warm summer nights in the South...but now you can't love anything or anyone because someone ended you with a knife I imagine the neon glow of a blinking sign on a cold hard concrete they made you fade away like the night breeze cools the rice that you used to chase with an already cool beer and I know that I couldn't have stopped them but  all you have now is the earth above and the earth below and all I have now is the pen and the words to write it

Just an object

From a distance, it is  utterly ordinary. Thin and still. One color, maybe three at the most. On its own, useless, not even heavy enough to hold a piece of paper in place against the threat of an agitating breeze. But placed in my hand, or your hand, it is a tool.
It is the tool.
On skin, on paper, on my favorite pair of jeans from high school, the ones covered in slogans and doodles.
Manipulated by human fingers, clutched in frantic sweaty palms. Or calmly sweeping back and fourth. Suddenly words and scrawls are painted across a surface that was once empty.
The pen brings life to the lifeless. As it warms between our thumb and pointer finger. As it rests against knuckle and middle finger. We use it and bring it to life as the words breath life into the page.
Ink flows, words appear, and the pen has a purpose.
Divine and beautiful or angry and erratic.
The words may be terms of endearment or expressions of hate.
The pen is Switzerland. The pen is neutral.
The pen doesn't give a shit of you love or loath.
The pen moves or dries up.
Or leaks and drips and forms little bubbles of blue/black spit across the page as you work.
The pen has a job to do. The pen never stays still for long.
When the words are in motion, so is the pen.

Me Writing about Myself

Having faith in yourself can be terrifying.
Saying YES to yourself feels so scary
I went through and deleted story fragments from here today
Not because I don't want to share with you, but because I want to share with the world

Because.

I have decided to trust myself,
to hope with a heavy amount of realism
that someday
someone
will want to publish words that I have strung together
That means that they can't be sitting here waiting

Just like I can't sit here waiting.

For me,
this act of hope is bravery.
It is part of a series of things that I am doing for myself
In an effort to become someone that I enjoy being
Someone I believe in.

I am staying quiet and listening more
I have gotten rid of the word hate, erased it from my every day vocabulary
I am forcing myself to take deeper breaths
concentrating on the action
waiting for it to become habitual.

I am taking care of myself
Not because I am all that I've got
I have a lot of people
and they deserve the best version of me
And so do I.

Breaking the silence with silence

I have restricted myself to written language today
I havent spoken a single word since I woke up

And it's been wonderful.

The most noise I made was when I ran the dishwasher.
Which is actually considerably loud.

I've spent the day thinking,
drinking coffee, staying warm, and doing this

Staying quiet is a thing that I'm doing just for me.
I'm being selfish and keeping myself to myself
And it's making a little grin stick to the corner of my lips

I'm thinking about all the sounds we make every day
Noises for each other to announce our presence in a room
To remind each other that we are here
To say "you're funny"
or
"I think I'm funny"


It's so nice to just
shhhh
to announce nothing
to no one
for just a little while

Needs and wants

Someone I love dearly forced me to write a poem and read it out loud.
So putting it here is way less scary than that.

I need S P A C E
My mind gets as cramped as my legs
My breath gets stilted when my body can't move
I need to look around and see   Nothing
Hear   Nothing

Every once in a while I need
   to be alone

I need to break away
   from who I am


I need to S T O P
   Stop being a daughter
                     a friend
                     a sister
                     a woman

I need the space to hear my thoughts
 without them bouncing off and ONE
                                           or any THING

Space can be filled so easily
Quiet ends so quickly

It can be hard to Stop and be S T I L L

I need to not be needed
to not be asked to laugh, listen, explain, or answer
to anyone but myself

I need the space empty
and the mood light

Am I alone in this?

Have you ever looked at your life and suddenly realized that it has started to escalate quickly like the fight scene in Anchorman?
One minute you're walking down the street with your friends wearing your fancy suits
and the next thing you know, Ben Stiller is sporting a Mexican Mustache and Brick is killing a guy with a trident?

And nothing does a better job of reminding you how emotionally ill-equiped you are for this than that big pimple on your face
(fyi: when morosely mumbling to myself about the age gap between me and my co-workers, I was NOT hoping for clogged pores to be the solution to evening the playing field)

So being in Grad school is hard because it is a LOT of work
but NOT being in Grad school is also hard because you feel like you're not working towards what you want in life
And cleaning your room is hard because Who Has The Time?
But NOT cleaning means that you can't bare to look around because the clutter is too painfully and accurately portraying what your brain looks like
So you wade around in your own filth with your eyes half squinted shut and pretend it's not there

And pretty much everything stays hard once you're no longer spending your time playing with My Little Ponies
and even that can be difficult because they get lost and its hard to pick your favorite and once you get creative and decide to play with braids or hair gel then there is No Going back
and that ugly braid (or god-forbid the sticking-straigh-up-strand from when you thought that pink plastic needed a trim) will haunt you for the rest of your life

And you vent at all the wrong times (like writing a blog instead of an essay)
And stay quiet when you should speak up (like when you let someone dictate your choices for you)
and hold it in when you want to let it out (because screaming in public is frowned upon)
Until you are loosing track of how long you've been standing in the shower
and you realize that those frustrating sounds are coming from you
as you mentally cross of your list
and edit you list
and add to your list

When did 11am start to feel like late rather than early?
When did 5:30 become time to wake up instead of the Middle of the night?
When did my life turn into one big To-Do list?

And how am I supposed to stay classy when I never had an ounce of class to begin with?