I spent most of 2018 in the bedlam of poetry. Poetry is like a wound — one that pains and one that heals. The wound is internal, garnering leverage over the organs with every experience the poet encounters. It forms and it festers, spreading wildly throughout the trunk of a person until it finally reaches the hands. And, through claws rigid with purpose, the poetry is expelled as ink onto parchment. The lesion that once victimized the poet transforms into liniment that relieves the aching reader.
My poetry was finally, fully expelled in November 2018 when I published, with great trepidation and greater reward, my first compilation of poems: Strong Language
. It could be argued that our most powerful appetite is for creation – a constant master that renders us unable to leave behind the mechanism of construction. We cannot help but to compose. What day or what hour didn’t see you forming ideas, designing sentences, or shaping reality? Creation is the only passion we don’t put down even in our sleep.
It was equal parts triumph and relief to fashion 77 wounds into an ordered piece of writing. Enthusiastic for every breed and every style of literature, my mind hammered the stone in a thousand different shapes at once. I could not tell the stone what shape I wanted, for I wanted them all. So, I abandoned expectations, prescriptive rules, and reservations to just form as many sculptures in as many styles as my mind ached to construct. My book of poetry is without a determined style and is without a certain format. It is a flowing river of bloody letters expelled from my wounds.
Poetry is alluring yet strikingly powerful – a delicate strike of lightning. I will remain in the storm a little longer.
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Faith, Health, and Other Musings 