I Guess It Has to Come From Somewhere

What’s the reasoning behind my impulse to write poetry; who is the little man behind the green curtain? It’s probably the same inclination that made me gay; or it could be the flu shot. That time my baby-fat ankle got stuck in a banister at summer camp and three grown adults had to hoist me out while I first learned the consequences of my body, or the Tamagotchi that Zannia Zie took from me on the bus and completely fucking reset to the egg stage even though I had just raised the thing to adulthood which, for the record, is incredibly difficult, especially when you have thirteen of them on one lanyard and are constantly begging your mom to go to CVS for watch batteries before you lose all of your progress. It’s the spontaneity at which I slip paint sample cards into my pockets at Wal-Mart, or how I handle my desk garden of cacti with my bare hands because finding the worksafe gloves is too hard, twenty dollars I spent on them be damned. It’s all the daddy longlegs I pull from out from under my bed between my fingertips and name Samuel before tossing them out into the cold to die. An improvisation of authority and organization. That time my stupid bitch of a Spanish teacher made me cry because I couldn’t pronounce “isosceles” in Spanish, no less make one on my pegboard. All of the times I say “stupid bitch” despite having a Women and Gender Studies minor. The steak knife I think I’ve still forgotten to remove from under my childhood dresser, which I stowed there first to fix the broken 3DS my mother snapped in half out of anger and second to take slices out of my arm in case I needed to make someone worry. The time that I didn’t actually do that because blood would have made me cry. Stupid bitch. All fifty of the furbies I have scattered around; I used to name them all and now it’s getting hard to remember all that. It probably comes from somewhere; exists unwritten inside of me, or something. I prefer to think of it as something I have to win over in order for it to exist with gifts and kisses and sweet nothings.

It’s an incitement. 

One Reply to “I Guess It Has to Come From Somewhere”

  1. Yes – this is an incitement and an excitement, too! This is a beautiful way to engage with the question of where poetry comes from. I’d like to encourage you, if you feel so moved, to think about this piece of writing as having a horizon beyond the blog. This could be revised into a prose poem that’s a kind of Ars Poetica (an art of writing poetry) or a Credo (a statement of what you believe in) or could approach the conditions of lyric nonfiction. What’s here is really valuable as a reminder of the kinds of events poems respond to, but it’s also an enactment of the juxtaposition and synthesis (including of emotion, intellect, and body) that the poem works through. Thank you for it.

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