This is my first blogpost in a while. 6 months to be precise. I have never been militant about my blogposts; they come when they come, when I feel the spark to create them.
But a point that strikes when I consider the gaps between them is the content of those gaps. Nothing truly remarkable I would say: just life happening quietly.
In the midst of that quiet, one or two peaks occur. Then, the question becomes: do I need or want to announce this?
But I correct myself. There is a difference between announcement and expression.
Just as there is between doing for productivity, and doing for the joy of doing.
Today, during one of my pauses, I felt again a familiar itch; it was the itch to write something. It didn’t have in it the anxiousness that comes with a neurosis to be productive. I’ve been there too many times and can catch it out more quickly these days. It was an itch to express because—well, “because” isn’t the most appropriate word to convey meaning here but it’ll do for the sake of convenience—because there was a desire to. Simple. Not for effect, not for feeling accomplished, not for any reason other than I like it.
It’s hard to get there, sometimes. In the flurry of writing to be published, to be read, blah blah, I have been pushing to remember my teenage self feeling warm and buzzed from the secret, solitary cave of writing. It’s a feeling that something so integral in your life force wants to announce itself. Quite innocently.
In these last months too, some poems have emerged from there…that cave, that gap, in and through life happening quietly. The poems grew as the months grew and soon, they quietly came together as a collection, which will be out in a few months.
I share with you today, not an announcement, but an expression. I’m feeling the giddiness from decades ago. Look, Ma, I wrote a poem!
This Room
This room
is where poetry grew
from tiles and unfixed ceilings
stained alcoholic yellow
with rain, in air particles born
within wombs of indoor climates
windows did not open here
soil made itself from tantrums
and thirst that magpies
carried messages from you
who’d not existed
some creature
who?
who knew?
who knew the insides
of my stomach sun
the contours of
my pelvic moon
the geography of
psychical seascapes
our person’s delta
poetry grew between
folded clothes, in unseen
mold on the hinges
of cupboards, on the cold wood
of study tables, on sheets marked
with blue ink and blood,
poetry grew out of owls’ hoots
when night told me
of histories floundering in seas
lit up with life
which is the reason we’re
here
but still too faraway
from the dirty purple lights
of a teenager’s mind
wait, the night said,
wait and learn not to
crawl, or walk, or run
but to glide
on poetry’s shoulders,
this hibernation will end
and poetry herself will begin
your flight to the veins
she has been growing
outside space-time
beating raw green
poetry grew in
the darkness of no light
she glides in the darkness
out of which light
is made
holy dirt fades
skies clear to you
the groom molded
in poetry’s room, by her hands,
by her filthy fertile promise
that one day she will grow
us into her flesh and pulse
make us into things made,
into poems.
we glide back
to this room
pick poems
out of the cracks
in walls, out of
holes on bookshelves
from the corners of
tables and chairs
our selves fertilized
again on poetry’s grains,
the indoor climate
marries its outdoor mirror,
poems drop from the sky
like all the rain
this land has missed.