I have let myself go to pot. I have stopped struggling and grinding. I’ve embraced girlfailure-ing. Slowly, I’ve been finally allowing myself time and space to heal the psychic and emotional wounds not just from my surgery, but also just the general damage from the pandemic.
For these efforts, suddenly, in a conversation, I felt my old familiar incandescent rage take over my body. The fury of my temper is back! I’m actually healing!
For a while, my emotions, usually powerful and mercurial, had become muted as the tumors silently grew larger and larger. And I lost that compulsion to create. I became disconnected from my pain-filled body and even lost the narrative thread of my own life story. Am I an artist if I no longer create? Am I a writer if I no longer write? who the fuck am I?
With the days growing steadily longer, finally, after a year or so, the compulsions have returned. Thanks to an annual art share event in my local community that I signed up for, I started writing poetry again. Poetry is something that I’ve mostly written for myself for a long time as a way to organize and expel my weird thoughts and feelings, and gain a sense of control over my personal narrative.
In college, I was always surrounded by English majors at my part-time job of writing tutoring despite being an art major. Often, I would get invited to open mic nights at the local coffee shop or poetry readings for my aspirational writer friends. Eventually, I got it in my head after listening to some very mediocre poetry that I could also write and share my own mediocre poetry too. Normally, I was a few beers in and so was the crowd, and we were all cloaked in darkness and the haze of the weekend.
The art share was a little different, as I was sober, and the crowd fully visible in bright fluorescent lights. Despite all of this, to my eternal surprise, people enjoyed my poetry and my art. And some people in the crowd asked me how long I’ve been doing this — and it was a question that surprised me greatly, as poetry has always been just incidental and accidental to my life. A poem is like a piece of food stuck in my teeth — it’s a relief to be rid of it finally after it annoys me, stuck and inflaming my gums.
So, I will be posting one of my poems every week on Tuesday basically until summertime. I have about 9 poems that have survived the various purges. The recent one I have been working on, that’s only half-cooked, has a working title of “The Promised Land,” which was inspired heavily by the concept of inshallah. Which means, if god wills it or allows it, it will be so. This is that place where we cast our hopes, our fears, our aspirations, our promises. It’s a pretty personal poem in which I’m trying to grapple with hopes and failures and fate and free will and what not. I hope I’ll finish it soon, but I’m still processing a lot of my ideas about it.
If you are interested in some of the live recordings of my poetry , please let me know and I can post them along with the text of the poems. I really believe poems are meant to be heard to be properly experienced.