National Poetry Month has been slightly rough in terms of writing actual poems, or anything at all to be honest! I didn’t want another Monday to go by without posting here, so I decided to put up one of the only semi-successful things I’ve written since April started. I read this article the other day about the tendency for writers to use “being too busy” to excuse neglecting their work. I felt guilty for a few minutes afterwards, thinking about how I’ve let my posting schedule slip the past few weeks. Then the defensive side kicked in. I justified my negligence by reminding myself that I’ve been busy doing other writing and school-related things, and have genuinely been trying to collect myself and rise out the emotional disarray of physical/mental exhaustion among other things.
You know when you wear your favorite pair of jeans every single time you need to put on “real” clothes, and the seams start splitting to alert you to what you already know, that it’s time to give these jeans a break. They stretch a little bit more the more you wear them, and then one day when you’re in public, most probably in the vicinity of someone you desperately want to consider you as more than their awkward but occasionally funny friend, they split violently as you try to take your seat. The spectacle is completed by the ugly scratching record sound that ripped seams have been known to make. Stay with me, I don’t know where this analogy is going. I guess my resolve and mental state are the seams? My poetry is usually better and nowhere near as melodramatic as this failed image. Usually.
***
There is a formless thing blocking my light.
It is tearing spongy pieces off itself and wedging them between my fingers, stretching and wrapping them around my hands and making it impossible for me to function.
The thoughts I need to sacrifice to writing are bottle-necked somewhere around my wrist, bunching up and twisting around each other, so that even when I can finally get my hands to work, I wont be able to pull the words apart.
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