It Surprises Me…I Write Poetry

7 minutes to read
It surprises me often that I write poetry
It surprises me often that I do not write detective thrillers
I do not want to write detective thrillers
I like writing poetry and I have always felt that it is a part of me
Like history I don’t talk about unless the hands not touching me are as open as a heart should be


This morning, I woke on time but not in the mood to follow my routine. So I prayed and read my Bible, thought yesterday’s last thoughts and added to them, felt within myself for more got it but still didn’t feel like exercising or dancing out of bed then editing or writing. I was starving though, belly too. So I ignored the building burn and pulled my phone to me again – so many tabs, so much food. I read, felt understood and understood. I read some more understanding that I am where I ought to be – in poetry because these words are me and they are my movement and aren’t I happy that I have never pretended to want to write to write or be a thriller when all I am is poetry, maybe too gaudy at times and maybe too sullen for eyes which don’t know that some girls hide from tangible danger gripping thin sheets the way soldiers thrust big, metal shields awaiting attack.


I am a poet – not published, not lauded, not in a circle the other girls don’t cling to me and I don’t see their hooks. We are different. They are social, know their laughter has meaning where mine is hallow. They have read great men and know names I lips form trying to hold them in my mouth. I am not smart enough, I think. I do not read enough poetry, I think. This is not where I belong – bloody and clawing a thigh stuck over there and the rest of me here crying to be let in. But it is, I see reading tabs of poetry – long forgotten research – I hear my own language. I hear my own song. I am not wrong. This is me. This is poetry. They, conceptual and not, might not see the poet in me but I feel her feet pounding music and her tongue dancing song.


It surprises me often that I write poetry
It surprises me often that I do not write detective thrillers


I have always read novels, found collections of poetry too smart for me and so I read more novels. In school they filled our lunch boxes with poems to learn, then devices for dissection, then poems for this surgery. We embarked on long surgeries, fun and dirty. And still I did not go out searching for my own surgeries. I stayed with the novel guys, old they were and simple. But whenever my heart presses into a page free, she sings to me like a music station. A music station, a station of music, I grew up on these – the only outside of religion which truly connected my mother to me. She passed on her love to me with the thing she had grew up on – a jukebox, her homework pattern. We were always happy singing along to Knock Three Times, I’ll Do Anything For Love, Dolly Parton, Lord Kitchner, Swallow. We were happy with music local and international, gospel and secular.


And I grew on these, added Jill Scott, and Avril Lavigne, read Eminem lyrics cause there was never enough soap unless the printer was editing, got more Sinatra, Everly Brothers, Elvis, Whitney Houston, Celine Dion, Britney Spears and Beyonce, John Mayer and Owl City, One Republic, Maroon 5, Snow Patrol, Jessica Simpson – that one song, Reba whose song cane unto the radio and made me think she had lived me to the point of stealing my words in the order I would had written them only I hadn’t written them. And after years and years of questioning how I could write poetry, say we are one when I don’t read her, I saw that I was always with her and she me in the music stations and the big music equipment at home which I’d almost forgotten, the one below the television and just as wide for which we had cassettes upon cassettes of music which played every weekend because music was the only thing happy thing we had even when it was sad.


I was always poetry
Poetry always was me


My words are music because it is who I was taught to be silent with music in my head, and beats on my feet and knock knock knocking words out these veins like vibrations from an outlawed speaker set. I always was meant to be poetry, didn’t know it. But I was meant to be, didn’t see it. I was meant to be, didn’t feel it. But I sure am glad to have read it in the lines of Rattle Magazine and The Texas Review. Writers across the sea and still they feel me, see me, share me…poetry.