November 13, 2025

my mind chases ideas
races miles a second
when there’s nothing to occupy it —
story ideas from every fleeting thought/
a line of a poem repeating and repeating and repeating/
all asking questions of me:
could this concept turn into a play?
could this plot twist be startling enough to entertain?
could this mulling be the next
great
american
novel?

[i gotta say, as exhausting as it is to have all these ideas all the time,
and as disappointing as it is to never remember them when i’m near
pen and paper/screen and keyboard,
it is so much better than the alternative i dealt with
for decades
of every time there was any sort of quiet
and my mind wasn’t 100% occupied
it just told me how much of a horrible, terrible, inhumane person i was
and how i should probably go die
or something…so yeah…would definitely prefer
this
to that]

May 5, 2024

my head is all over the place
which can make for interesting poetry
when i cannot follow one subject all the way through
but fifteen different thoughts have already sped through
my racing brain
but the sleep is also tugging
and i have no way of judging
which direction to go
or how much to write
or let go
or just let it be
as it is
in this mess that it is in

~~~

if i actually followed the stream of consciousness/
the different trains that blast off from
the one station of *my brain*
i still don’t think i’d have words for most thoughts —
‘high speed’ ‘ugh, typing’ ‘that beat’ ‘coffee’ ‘food’ ‘puppies’
none of those words tell a story
in the way i’d want my poetry to express —
how i called it a stream, but i feel like my thoughts are trains
holding all the context for each word within each car
but they blast off like high-speed rail, something i’d love to have in this
fucking country, and sometimes i’m on the train itself, but sometimes i’m left at the station
waiting for all the thoughts to come back to me, eventually
[hopefully whole, with some new passengers/context aboard]

~~~

i feel like the more i write
the worse my poetry ends up
and i don’t know what to do
or how to think
about that.

July 16, 2022

my brain
is not retaining
a track this
morning

and i’m worrying
and resting
all at
once

but the flow
comes and goes
and i have no way to
figure out what
is happening
and where
it is
go–
ing