February 10, 2023

sunflowers
are my favorite flower.
something about the big, bright, open yellow
captivates me
and makes me
(almost always slightly secretly dour)
smile so huge.

i often forget that half of the flower is brown,
the earth/
the base of nature/
it wouldn’t be a sunflower without that circle of non-yellow;
the seeds to form new flowers in the future
the giving after giving
of joy/
of new life/
of another kind of open-ness.

i know it’s a bit toxic
to constantly give,
but take it from the sunflower:
sometimes giving gives us our own beauty.

February 9, 2023

is my autocorrect
sabotaging me?
filling in where i mean to leave off?
changing stances in stanzas
that need the awkwardness i placed?

my dear laptop computer,
please—
poetry is a delicate balance
of grammatically correct
and rule-breaking chaos
and i need to tread that line very carefully
so any help from you,
while appreciated,
is really not needed…

so no need to try
so damn
hard.

February 7, 2023

i feel as though all my words this morning
are tilting towards something useful
a new perspective
or solid poetry
or something

but none of them are actually arriving

they are simply hanging
tilted
on the precipice of something
but nothing
is bringing them
back to
earth

February 5, 2023

i know
i’m not,
but i feel like i’d call myself
a human disaster.

i was going to compare it
to my perfectionistic tendencies,
but i think they are tightly interwoven;
like
if i wasn’t a perfectionist
i wouldn’t be assessing myself
in the ‘disaster’ arena—

i’d just let me be me.

February 4, 2023

acting
theatre
the arts

they are art
but they are also my job

and so i view them as such
otherwise
i get too overwhelmed
i get too anxious over everything

so if i treat them as a career
a necessity
an activity i’ve done so much i could probably do it in my sleep
they don’t hold power over me

and then i can do them

better

February 2, 2023

i am in a mood where
sitting still by a blank document
one arm on the table/laptop/keyboard
one in my lap
no movement
just thought
is far more comforting
(and possibly productive)
than churning out poem after poem

~~~

and yet i will write
because that is what i do
and that seems to be my calling
(at least as of late)
and sometimes one needs to have a moment of stillness
before capturing that stillness in art
(if we just try to capture it without fully feeling it
that art is meaningless
wouldn’t you agree?)

~~~

the droopy eyelids
hover over my eyes
laden with sleep
and a few days of tech week
and i am contemplating writing
contemplating huddling back under the sheets
contemplating at least a few moments of peace
before the craziness of today begins

February 1, 2023

writing in bed
is interesting
especially when we’ve established
so many constant things
about writing at the table
downstairs//
but this morning
i think we both needed
something
either a right away poetry day (me)
or a change of space/place/and pace (kip)
or
simply a nicer/slower start to the morning (both of us)

but it now
doesn’t really feel like
morning any more