Alphabets

My body is trying to tell me that I need to write again.

A few nights ago, as I was going to sleep, but not quite ready for bed, I dozed off with my face in my pillow. For a few split seconds I saw a carousel. As it turned silently in my mind, I narrated the scene to myself in short lines of poetry. I awoke suddenly and said aloud, "I need to write again."

I was startled by the words. I don't know why I said it, but it left me unsettled.

I have a confession. I'm kind of mad at my poetry. Around my senior year of college we began to develop an adversarial relationship. I think this arose, at least in part, because I didn't know what I was going to do with my life, but I knew what I desperately wanted to do with my life, which was write poetry.

One day I decided that I wasn't going to dedicate the rest of my life to writing. I decided that I was going to do something else and that, to spite my writing, I'd be very happy with my decision and very good at my chosen career (luckily for me, the first part of this is true, and as for the second part, well, I guess my boss would be the judge of that).

I've tried to explain a poet's relationship with words, but I just can't. The only people I've met who sort of understand are musicians. Even people who prefer prose don't seem to feel the same way about writing as poets.

All of this confusion and emotion and anger and pain that comes from this mad passion can leave one feeling quite isolated. I grew tired of the isolation. The only thing that made it bearable for a few years was having a close friend, another poet, nearby to talk about these things that no one else understands. When she moved to California to go to graduate school, my entire poetic support network moved with her. I began to resent my writing.

When I angrily decided that I would not pursue writing as a career, I felt as if I had KO-ed my writing love. I was proud of myself. I felt strong. Poetry could not defeat me if I were simply to quit.

Still I find these moments of pain. I feel an emptiness. I hear phrases, names, fragments of conversation that I want to save and use in my poems. Indignantly, I refuse to claim them.

I feel as though I had a small lover's quarrel with my soul mate and, because we are both stubborn, we both refuse to come back to one another. Each is waiting for the other to yield.

It's a conundrum. Intangibles can't really yield. As a result, I'm always the one to come crawling back. I'm tired of crawling back. I'm ready for the writing to come to me.

But it won't.

A few months after I'd made this quiet decision, my LA poet started to catch on. She started to ask me about my writing. Ask me if I was writing and what I was writing. I kept telling her I didn't have the time. "Make the time," she said, "you need to write." I brushed her off. I grew annoyed with her for reminding me of something I was trying to forget.

She'd try to coax me and encourage me by telling me how I was better than almost everyone in her master's program. I told her she was exaggerating.

Then one day, for some reason or another, I sat down, and almost against my will, almost without my own consent, I wrote two or three poems. They were amazing. They were the flawless sort of works that are so perfect you feel they could almost fly off the page. The kind of poems that have no "process" and so can't be explained. The kind of poems that make poets crazy because they don't know how or why they write them, they just do (every poem I have written that has ever won an award has been this kind of poem).

I showed my LA poet. She said, "Oh my God, you need to write. There are so few good writers, I can't sit by and let one of them not write."

Here was my friend, trying to be the best friend and fellow writer she could be, encouraging me, giving me feedback, being supportive, not nagging - approaching the situation in the best way she could - and I wouldn't listen.

I was (and still am) really mad at my writing.

I'm still mad at my poetry.

I used to be in a place where reading a good poem brought me unbelievable joy, but now I'm in a place where it angers me. I've become something I loathe: a jealous writer.

Jealousy always seems a sign of mediocrity to me, especially among writers. Those who are great should not envy talent, they should admire it. Those who are great need not envy greatness, because they have it themselves. My jealousy showed me just how pitiful I'd become.

So I buried myself in outside things. I became so busy and so "otherwise occupied" that my once feigned excuse of busyness became a truth. There were a few months where I thought I might never write again. I even began reading some good fiction without having pangs of regret.

Then came that dream.

I have been uneasy since that dream, but I've left room for the uneasiness to persist.

Two nights ago I dreamed one of my dead friends was secretly still alive and disguised as another of my friends. The dream was long and involved. I was overjoyed. I felt the invisible scales of life's justice had finally tipped in his favor. I went along with the ruse. The dream ended with my friend fainting unexpectedly. Someone was coming, and I didn't know who. I sensed we were in danger. I picked up his motionless body and began to carry him. I carried him up flight after flights of stairs. I reached the top of the building with his body in my arms. There was no where else to go. I woke up.

I don't know what that dream means, but it is a clear message that I need to write again. There are too many things that, left unsorted, will explode out of my mind in confusing and painful ways, and rather than turning into something creative and beautiful, they will fester and hurt. I can't keeping pretending I don't need this. It's ridiculous.

A famous professor of mine once spoke of the magnitude of the poet's "fucking ego." "We all want to write all good things all the time," she said, "we all have this big fucking ego." She's right. This unspeakable trepidation I feel is fear that I will write something unsatisfying to me.

How shameful of me to have succumbed to my own pride in a way that ultimately ended up destroying the very pride I was trying to protect. What a stupid poetic thing to do. How deluded must I have been to believe that stopping the outlet I use to release all of my ideas and creations, good and bad, would stop the ideas and creations themselves?

Awakening with the feeling of the weight of my friend's body still lingering in my arms was a good reminder that, I guess to put it simply, I am who I am. Frustration, anger, indignation, pride - nothing will change that.


So LA poet, if you read this, "thank you" and I'll see you soon.