saying they don’t like my poems,
that they never really fucked with me anyway.
took months for the air of this
to reach me.
talking shit is like a cold front-
cold air is heavier than the warm
displaces it
disappears every hug and piece of praise
I shared with those poets
in a five year time span
and subsequently I buried my voice
out in my own backyard
after I had just unearthed it.
Wouldn’t want to bother them.
instead I robbed myself
of the ability to build worlds
because I didn’t revolve around theirs
because someone finally said
what the depths of my doubt
have always known:
that my poems are pointless
that my
wild loud soft and sharp
needn’t be collected and spoken.
I used this as a long awaited excuse
to stop
dissecting my trauma
to turn that interest
exclusively academic
sometimes I still move like
in a peer reviewed journal:
Study Examine Analyze
Delineate
Dissociate
Dissolve.
In a way
it is a lot easier
to let the trauma erode
what’s possible
convince me
that how I think is not something
that needs recorded.
This is what the autism, the adhd, and the anxiety tell me anyways.
If I don’t let the poem
string itself sensical
then I don’t have to introduce myself
to myself on a loop
If I don’t make that mental leap at therapy
I don’t have to feel my way through it.
If I don’t write the anthology,
I don’t have to cower in the shadow
of a maybe brilliant thing
I have just built and live up to it
or in the shadow of a book
no one reads
Instead, I can just be shadow
pretend it is mysterious allure
not cowardice that paints me
quiet
not disappointment
or betrayal.
If I never let anyone too close
they can’t tell the difference.
It takes so much energy
to be alive
to shut the poems down.
I thought I was doing myself
and everyone else a favor
by finally shutting up.
stayed out of the scene for years
but they don’t stay
gone-
the critics
or even the poems
so why silence myself?
for the illusion of safety?
for men?
I know I have to speak
for myself
but the longer I live,
the harder this narrative is
to do out loud.
I think myself so far into myself
that I think
in spiral
into a shell
into a relic
into the question,
am I a scholar of my own trauma
or an architect of my own fixation around it?
Then, I grab a shovel
and get back to work.
& 