February 4, 2022

man
these morning poems aren’t doing shit for me
and i’ve felt adrift since 2022 day three
and i thought i’d found where my serotonin was lost
but it turns out it was just capitalism in a silly mustache
and i tried for a while to follow the dopamine
but i guess that dopamine i followed wasn’t meant for me
so i suppose i could just succumb to the unconscious dreams of sleep
but naps give me less time to accomplish the day
but is it even day if the sky is so grey
and the haze of the rain pounds the panes in sheets
and this playlist slaps but sometimes too much too deep
and i’ve probably lost the rhyme scheme somewhere in this mush of words
but i push and i pull and i try to open new doors
but they scare me so much
i’m paralyzed
to the floor

so i guess i’ll write
and write some more
until i can pull up my feet
and walk outside
once
more.

January 15, 2022

i feel like i’m a the tail end of my creative flow
and i know
that’s not how it goes
it’s a well that never runs dry
but sometimes
the rain droughts or floods
and circumstances can dictate
more states
that i’d like
but, like,
why can’t i at least have some sort of
steady flow,
trickle,
a tickle
in my brain
would be better
than this blankness
that fills my mind
like a void
negating every possible
creative
thought
and turning it
to
stone
cold
static
over
and over
and over
again…

October 24, 2021

i’ve been writing and deleting
for a few days now
[and drawing and erasing]
and i know this happens
no matter what;
it is inevitable at some point
to need to re-create
in order to finish a creation

but i’ve been starting and immediately stopping,
each burst of creative energy is met with
“ehhh…maybe not…”
to then need to forge a new path
ahead

and i am unsure if this means i am having trouble following a complete path
or perhaps i’m simply noticing earlier where paths will not lead
or maybe it means i’m putting everything down on paper[screen]
when i initially start
instead of editing myself in my head

whatever the reason
[be it “good” or “bad” or “neutral”]
it doesn’t stop the “now”
from being quite frustrating
every time.

August 18, 2021

it is approximately
one month shy
of the one and a half year mark
of Kip
going into work
physically.

and i’m getting all nervous
about them going into work
physically today,
though their work is vaccine only,
and mask encouraged,
and Kip told me they’d probably keep their mask on all day long,
but i’m still all nervous

maybe it’s because i’ve been the one to actually go outside
in this Global Patrick Stewart;
i’ve gone grocery shopping
and picked up prescriptions
and had doctors’ appointments
and circus classes
and marches
and protests
and Kip has accompanied me on a couple adventures,
a protest here,
a vacation there
(a vacation where
we still only stayed inside our airbnb the whole time)
so i’ve been out on my own
and Kip has not
and they are a grown adult
and used to make this trip
into physical work
every
work
day
arriving between 8 and 9
leaving between 5 and 9 (depending on after-work activities)
and they learned the streets of manhattan
around their work
and maybe i’m just nervous
that they will once again
have a life apart from our tiny Brooklyn living box
but i also want them to have their own experiences
so we can come together at the end of the day
and share our stories
together.

i have no need for them to only have a life as i can see it,
similarly, i enjoy their encouragement of my
circus classes
and acting classes
and film projects
and artistic endeavors,
but i’m still all nervous…

(i wonder if this is how they’ve felt every time i went in
physically
to an aerial space
over this last year or so…)

~~~

i know
it’s possible
to hold in one’s heart
the gratitude
that one has personally
dodged a bullet
as well as the support
and solidarity
of those who experienced it entirely

but i can’t seem to convince my physical form
that this is, indeed, a thing that can happen.

~~~

my creativity
is still part of me
even when i’m not actively
making up worlds
and writing new words
and surpassing my own expectations.

my creativity
never leaves
just sometimes
it might need
a bit of a
nap.

August 4, 2021

it’s the dichotomy
between
my very private personality
and my desire/impulse to overshare at every opportunity

it’s the balance to find
between
loving the little luxuries in life
and not feeling fully fulfilled
unless i’m working insanely hard

it’s the desire to be the raw, young talent
switching between
wanting to be respected, knowledgable, wise

it’s the old soul behind a young face,
it’s the bubbling energy inside an aging body

it’s the creativity battling the perfectionism
it’s the wanting to do good, placed against knowledge of how bad it really is

it’s loving humanity
and being so scared of people
all at the same time

it’s the dichotomy

and it’s forever battling inside me

(i have always identified with Aang,
but maybe i’m more like Zuko,
trying to prove myself,
working against insurmountable odds,
until another option shines through
and i realize i didn’t need to work that hard to begin with)

(that analogy didn’t lead where i initially thought it would…)

August 1, 2021

i don’t know how
i knew it was approaching
the end of july
but somehow didn’t remember
next comes august,
because as soon as i see the date
my stomach turns
and my heart palpitates
and i start worrying about the summer reading i only half finished
and the schedule i need to complete
and the downhill roller coaster snowball out of control truck
that is
School.

even though it was only public school that started in august,
and i haven’t even been enrolled in a school for eight and a half years,
there’s a trauma that’s associated with
the educational system here
and it teaches us more
about how to be uncomplaining drone workers
than anything critical thinking
enjoyment of learning
sort of thing

and any amount of years of higher education
won’t help us recover
from 12+ years
of…that…

and i do call it a trauma,
though nothing about it was grossly traumatic,
because if your body reacts to a thing as a trauma
it is.

~~~

don’t know if i want to be so dramatic as to post that
implication and bias and only a half-way understanding of how our american educational system was actually built
but i do believe my therapist when she tells me that if something feels like trauma in your body, it is,
because our bodies often know more about what’s happening than our brains
which is why sometimes it’s an easy coping mechanism
to divide ourselves from our physical selves
to avoid that confrontation, that knowing,
in order to simply survive one day, one hour, one minute, one second at a time…

~~~

i would watch a movie/tv show
about a villain
who truly believes they’re the hero
and everyone around them insists they are,
they have state of the art gadgets and mentors
[which my autocorrect changed to monsters]
telling them where to fight, and whom,
and they go about their time fully believes they are doing good,
for a solid 7-8 years they feel they’ve done such good
and then, for whatever reason, they have all their gadgets and things taken away,
as well as a fair amount of their people,
but with less people insisting on their heroism,
and more interaction with the world as it really is,
they start to suspect they’ve been the villain all along,
and they get into an artistic expression as a form of therapy
to understand the awful things they’ve done
and they begin to represent the people they’ve hurt
in said artistic endeavor
as a healing,
and though they don’t expect their own personal healing will help the families of those they’re representing,
they try to raise money
(as they are still in the public eye)
to help those families.
a roller coaster ride of a hero/villain/citizen story
a true story of redemption
a cautionary tale of only listening to those on your side
(and of blindly going into the ‘family business’)
and obviously not inspired by any real person or story in our country or society
at all.

July 14, 2021

once again
my frantic creativity
is failing me
this morning page time
and i know i have things i wanted to write about
and i know i have things i needed to write about
and i know i have things i could be writing about

but the sky feels grey, not blue
and the world seems tipped slightly askew
and i can’t conceive of how long this off-ness will last
(nor if it’s truly a case of of perception,
or if it could simply be a time of transition
asleep to awake
un-caffeinated to caffeinated
cat-lap-less to cat-lap-full
[and let me tell you, those claws in my legs sure helped me wake a little more])

so i suppose i’ll keep writing.
hoping things start making more sense,
hoping the coffee soaks its way to my veins,
pet this cat until my fingers find more words to write
(and forgive her when her affectionate head bumps a few letters out of place)

because this is my life;
i made it.
mine.

July 10, 2021

concentrate first on what you’re writing
don’t think about how to perform it
nor what people are going to think of it
nor what people will say to you

sunday will arrive far sooner than you expect,
why make it arrive earlier
by anticipating everything that will happen?
(maybe that’s just how my brain works?)
(but it seems very, very unhelpful)

~~~

i don’t know why
french café music
calms me so
but it sure does
so here it plays
morning after morning
picking up a few more words every dawn
surprising myself by how much i understand
hoping one day to catch it all.

~~~

am i ever going to attack
full, epic, long-form, big damn poetry
again?

(i suppose i just did,
what with the monologue assignment
i just wrote slam poetry for,
and i suppose i shouldn’t
count out
the big poems
sitting in this giant document
just waiting for revisions
and posting)

but it confuses me,
this ebb and flow of poetry
of how some days words slip and flow
and some days i must pull and pull and pull
and what that all means for myself
and me
and my creativity…

June 10, 2021

i feel as though
i have very little to say lately
going through and posting poems
from this experiment of poetry journaling
poetry-every-day-ing
poetry for poetry’s sake
-ing
and i used to have so much to say
even if it was just writing about writing about writing about writing
the lilt of the poems
lifting off the screen
i could feel the tempo in my mouth
but lately
i’ve been
ever
so
slightly
more
stagnant.

May 21, 2021

should i still be aiming for a word count
if my goal is simply a kind of getting in touch with my creativity
my brevity
my word choice
my ability?

going through poems the other day,
in a frenzy to organize my most disorganized thoughts,
gave me the reminder that i once wrote five hundred words
easily
in one poem
my structure was simply
get the thought out
ponder it
in poem form
use the words
sparingly
but still explore
within words
what the concept means to me

do i not do that anymore?
or was the long form a new addition to the creative family
taking up residence in my brain?

kipventures poetry started out as shorter form,
some days only one to three lines
describing a whole adventure in a strange new place

so…why does nothing feel that familiar anymore?

should i explore what this family of creatives does
in my head?
or is that a one-off concept
simply useful for that singular line
and
(ope, another random memory
this time the apartment kip and i shared
in that house
in Pittsburgh
[what is it with Pittsburgh
recently?]
the sunlight streaming in through the attic bedroom windows
the weird mirrored closet doors
driving around
five below
dunken donuts vegan bacon on bagel breakfast sandwiches
that whole summer
stressful
and yet
such good memories)
what even was i talking about?

i went off on another tangent
in my brain
of when kip and i were first together
mowgli hadn’t even been born yet
but louka was living her
hard dog life
(in dog jail, if the stories are true)
and how do/will i feel about that?
if we do end up being able to adopt
and our baby is already born as of right now
am i going to look back on this time and think
‘i was so privileged, and our baby was so not,
what was i doing enjoying my life
while our baby was in trouble?’
but i can’t know that now
there are too many possibilities
to ponder
i know this is the anxiety
but it also feels like the worst super-power;
i can imagine and contemplate and see all paths,
past, present, future,
the possibilities endless
and they are all in my
stupid human brain
the insurmountable number
being
what makes my brain
damn near explode
(maybe i am super-human
simply from being able to hold all those possibilities
without any sort of fiery
boom,
but who knows;
it’s building up
it could happen
any day
now…)