beside myself

grief in waiting

the emergent spiral © paul john dear photography

I have a bunch of poems in my drafts folder. Some are new and some are older pieces being re-worked. This particular poem continues to spiral around me, asking to be sat with in a different way, nudging a new line or two into form and letting others go.

I used to think of this of this as an origin poem but it is a shapeshiting proposition in truth.

Here is the latest iteration.

~

i get to write with the authority of the broken

it lends a glissade of authenticity to what lives in the crevices

~

numbed by ghosts of neglect and abandoned by my first pen

i bled my early poems onto internment’s damp and mossy walls

~

fingering that crimson scrawl as dead spider-foot scribbles

painting a cloak of acceptability, a flourish of skin as chimera

~

there i learned to unstitch the lips of my incremental refusals

imbibing the void and plying my sacrificial howling art

~

hoping for a sign that the maker of those poems was alive and well-

beyond the mask-made-mirage of a soul invisible

~

truth is

there is a poet

~

it’s not me though

~

this dreamt up stream of consciousness which i pen 

i

   do

         not

                own

i am not really here

~

just a rizla paper away from being-

Damoclesed a thousand times

~

the wound singing itself

infinite spirals

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