Tag: lyrical essay

People ask me about technique.

I disappoint them.

I have never sat down
to write a poem
thinking about meter
or form
or whether the line
should break here
instead of there.

That does not mean
those things do not matter.

It means they were never
my point of entry.

I don’t write
because I understand
what I’m feeling.

I write
because I don’t.

I don’t know where a poem begins.

I only know
that sometimes
I write a sentence
and spend years
becoming the person
who can understand it.

Maybe that is where the poem begins.

Not in clarity.

In the private disorder
language has not yet learned
how to hold.

The poem arrives before the explanation.

Before the lesson.

Before the clean version
people prefer
after pain has been made useful.

I do not trust that version.

I trust the fragment.

The unfinished sentence.

The line that breaks
because something in me
cannot continue
without silence.

That is technique too.

Not the kind I studied.

The kind the body invents
when the mind
has no argument left.

The poem knows before I do.

It knows where I am hiding.

It knows what I am circling.

It knows the truth
before I can survive
saying it plainly.

That is why I write this way.

Not to confess.

Confession suggests
I have arrived somewhere
with evidence in my hands.

Most of the time
I have not arrived.

Most of the time
I am still standing
inside the question.

And the poem—
if it is honest—
does not answer it.

It simply stays there
with me

long enough
for something true
to recognize itself.