December 28, 2023

swirling in my mind
worlds and stories and epic tales
i cannot find
i can’t even look
for fear that the search
is what makes them disappear
so i seem, from the outside, like a normal
everyday
human
maybe a little weird
maybe a little queer
but otherwise fine
but inside…
inside the roiling mess, the boiling mass
of tangles of plot lines
and whole universes overlapping
to the point of chaos
and i want to pull at one solitary string
hoping
it’ll un-loose
and unleash
a story-worthy ~something~
but
i’m scared
it won’t
and i’m even more scared
the harder i pull at one
the farther tangled
the other ones will become
until i’m
all out of opportunities

June 27, 2023

i wish i knew how stories started
i just happen upon the middle of a tale
and try to recite it from there
but i get tangled in the information
the exposition
and the context
and i can’t tell how much everyone else
needs

niche storytelling practices
need niche audiences
to hear them

and i am but one
person

who out there is like me?

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)