Written by Alex

Me as a Writer

from her Creative Writing class "Memories" project
I want to write.
I need to write –
hopeless lost words of poetry
flowing from my fingertips
like a berry bleeding dark
off crimson juices.

To squeeze and mangle
every last bit of sense from this language
I want – I need –
to put something onto paper.

Fabricated webs where cruel villains play the spiders,
The protagonist the fly, trapped within
a thickly woven net of misplaced meter
feet askew the spider crawls to the prey
and eats our poor, crunchy hero alive

In these times, our times,
breath is short my breath
holds
as if it is afraid to leave my body
just like the words
crawl back into simple cells
of membrane.
Refusing to be birthed into an artificial world.

Poetry thrives in a forlorn world
it eats murder, suicide, and rape for breakfast.
It scrounges the city streets
scrabbling in trash cans and taking the change
from the homeless man’s cup, on the corner.

it is everything we cannot be,
happiness in misery,
faith in the godless,
hope for those who will soon leave us.

And I want to capture it.
I yearn to tame the untamable.
I need to write.