They listened as I spoke my poetry out,
making it somehow more real,
and less defined, by me,
all at once.
What’s the word for words that make
you feel?
I can’t remember, but,
I know that I recognised,
In the choices I made of
which words to choose,
that I left so many more out.
How it feels when my cheek is kissed,
How I ran to the swans,
How I feel everything – too much.
Sometimes.
It made me think about why I love
writing poetry, and all I could think about
was the tension of desire –
In every word, I am choosing to leave out
something,
In doing so, I deny it from myself,
while at the same time,
I reach for a higher experience. Something
that makes me feel whole, here,
This thing that makes me feel awake,
and takes the shape,
Of words I never have the patience,
to shake out of my body.
My skin, muscle, bone and blood,
keep them close,
In case there’s not enough time,
to communicate
an awe for the world we live in.
Poetry is my desire made manifest,
in a world where we invest so much,
in how we look to others.
The sanctuary of an unceasing frustration,
that calls me back, back, back,
from the edge of mental sanitation,
from a cleansing of my mind that would take everything good, too.
Even when I sleep –
You see I’m trying to tell you –
that this is how much it means to me,
to speak poetically.
Maybe it’s not poetry,
to you.
Frustration, beautiful, glorious, real,
frustration pairs with me an inability,
with all my education,
to fully express to another,
how my soul sighs and sinks in deep
to a sunrise like it’s a call to sleep,
Because the daylight makes me feel safe.
I wonder, then,
About you.
What is your frustration, your desire,
your complication in a form
only you can express,
quite this one way?
with the perfect lilt –
be it accent and tongue, or hip and heel-toe?
I wonder if it takes the form of equations,
rounded clean numbers,
or music – is it ciphers or
psithurism that your soul
remembers, as if what you reach for,
is something you’ve always had
just out of reach?
Like the stars, my desire is shining.
It guides me home, and signals rest.
It tells me it will watch over my soul,
When I can’t accept,
life as it appears, it speaks to me of depth,
In a world where I feel starved of it.
My unending frustration is the manifestation,
Of a desire I have only ever been able to someway
express through words,
where, at best, I realise that I
am searching for my soul,
and in the searching I found what makes me whole,
it doesn’t wear a face,
Or have blood run through its veins,
these days it barely has ink,
and, yet, my first love remains,
a frustration made manifest,
a desire that signals rest and
forces me to prioritise by strokes of twenty-six,
As I’m writing this,
I am close to being twenty-six,
I realise of all the gifts,
I was ever given,
My favourite is one that continues to
make me sweat
about the strangest things –
desire without the context of things,
a frustration that is made manifest by
a need to express this way
to see who might,
feel soul in their night,
and think, it’s time to
write.
