in previous iterations of myself i was a poet. if not poet – no less than a writer. the older i get the farther away it seems. just barely beyond my grasp.
as far away as it feels to me it is the picture of me that some people carry. not a hairstyle, not a particular outfit, but rather an abstraction of me. an inked me. scrap paper in hand and a collection of words spilling out of me at irregular but frequent intervals.
until yesterday, the last poem i’d written for more than very personal reasons was in late 2003. in some ways that doesn’t seem so long ago but in reality five years is eons. children go to school, students complete college…
cavalier as i’ve tried to be about the loss of my muse..i miss her. the ability to pull out the raw parts of my world and place them “away”. i have to admit i took it for granted, the gift of putting my reality into a context that was easily manageable and strangely tangible as it was leaded into paper and the tops of to go containers. i remember Korey watching me in confusion as i scrawled out something in the margins of a newspaper as we sat in a car waiting for our movie. it was just something i did.
and i did it until i didn’t do it anymore.
and then i felt the absence of my pencils, my pens, my voice. i never realized how closely my poetry tied me into what i was feeling…trying to forget…wanting desperately to remember. recently i threw away a lot of it. feeling removed from that part of myself, needing to consolidated the space i was borrowing from my folks, assuming i had moved on and rid the world of one more mediocre poet’s musings…only they weren’t just mediocre poems…they were mine. first kisses and utter loss and heartache, anger, betrayal, humor. those words were a chronicle of my life, the pulse of where i’ve been.
as i try to resume my life as a poet – undercover or on stage – i’m finding it most difficult to take the words that i say from my mouth and reassemble them into something able to stand on their own – without my inflection, the look in my eyes. i feared i’d killed my muse, starved her from disuse and neglect…but yesterday i managed a few lines that didn’t make me want to shred the page they rest on. and in writing them i feel a little more connected to that piece of myself. the wordsmith (if only in my own world). the mother of metaphor. the chronicler of feelings and not just facts.
so maybe now i can stop for a moment. take a breath. touch what i’m feeling and commemorate that feeling with something less fleeting than a passing blog.
Tags: arts, me-ness, transition