You know how the morning after a night of unkempt raging you cradle your hangover in your hands and swear to yourself and anyone unfortunate enough to be around you that “I’m never drinking again!”? That’s how I felt in the immediacy following the publishing of both my poetry collections.
After each was finally ready to go to the print on demand presses, every ounce of my body’s metabolizing cellular sludge exuded a this-is-this-last-time-I-do-this sort of relief.
It’s weird I felt that way, considering. I’ve been writing poetry most of my life. Long before I had a name for what I was doing. But still, the act of selecting, correcting, changing, refining, re-writing, proofing, choosing this poem over that one, this phrase over that, laying out, picking this word over that one; turned out to be so poetically draining that in the weeks following my focus drifted by design to more practical writing endeavors—the sort that pays for pizza. Remember, even Frost had a day job.
“I think I’m done with poetry,” I told several people after How We Are Human.
It’s just a sigh over two months since publishing that book. Like the time following iPoems, I’ve had some silent weeks void of my usual compulsion to cover napkins, paper plates, newspaper scraps, walls, goats—whatever surface I could write on without grievance—with verse.
But now I’m at it again.
Bloody hell.
What is this drive that moves pen to pad? It’s strange that something that is so optional feels as inevitable. It’s enough to bring a me swear the Greeks were onto something—that every ounce of air carries traces of a muse’s crafty perfume—whose scent makes us sings the world’s songs.
And just like the last time I said, “this is the last time,” the evidence for it being so is not compelling. Slowly, the creation of new poems, markedly different from previous ones, have been creeping back into my day to day.
Adding to a trio of poems I wrote before leaving the US, earlier this evening, as a bumpy matatu (Kenyan public transportation) bumbled it’s way to my Kenyan uncle’s house, I found myself avoiding the immediacy of studying Swahili lessons in my notebook or drafting remunerated freelance work to instead pen words that seemed overly eager to be said.
I guess poetry has me by the balls.
But whatever.
I know I like it.
