January 22, 2025

i’d love to be a
“yes and”
find the funnest stream
go with the flow
and see whatever happens
happening
kind of person

but raising myself from the time i was
approximately 11
gave me some sort of
perfectionistic
type-a-personality
care and careful
self-preservation
overly cautious
kind of vibe constantly fighting against my
natural chaotic state

and hey

maybe it’s the opposite

maybe my natural state is more type-a
and the immediacy of seeing how
life is fleeting
gave me the drive to try to
induce chaos and joy in my life

but whichever way the truth lies
the sentiment still stands:
i have one part of me in chaos
and one part of me trying for strict alignment
and the two parts are forever fighting
inside my mind/my heart/my body/my soul
and rather than tempering each to a
reasonable level, they simply
stop
all action in either direction
and so i am neither cautious nor chaotic
i am simply

stuck.

September 14, 2021

stress and
apprehension and
a desire to make these poems
go somewhere.
i’m constantly plagued
haunted by
itching with the possibility
of a full story
expanding
under a reader’s nose
(what was that one book?
Green Angel?
something like that?
where it was poetry
that unfolded
into a complete story?)
and i want these Morning Poems
to tell my story,
but how can they
when my story isn’t done yet?
i may be right at the beginning
i might be hella in the middle
but one thing’s for certain:
life is messy
and stories are good or bad in how they’re told,
not the stories themselves,
especially when they’re true
honest
nonfiction.
it’s the fiction that gets the nice, neat bow at the end;
life blurs around the edges
try hard as you might
to color inside the lines
so embrace the chaos
cacophony
quandary
(and, of course, let your imagination ride out
the potential
of telling a portion of this story
your story
in this form you’ve happened upon…
maybe there is a way to tie up
the loose ends
of a fraction
of your tale.
in fiction,
of course)