Just like most of the world, this year has gotten me thinking a lot about what I have to be grateful for, what’s holding me back, and what I want to accomplish in the future.
This year I was giving myself a hard time for not writing much outside of work. For having failed at so many attempts at blog posts or launching Udemy courses.
In the age of personal branding, it feels like I need to have an intensely focused topic or special circumstances to be worthy of sending my thoughts into the ether. I finally started realizing how ridiculous this was. That I am just self sabotaging by not allowing myself the space I need to write and reflect.
And as I chastise myself for not writing enough, I realize I have several written several poems this year I only posted on Instagram. I decided to post them below and bring them into the light.
I’ve also been writing a short story that is so closely related to who I am and who I want to be that it has been hard to move forward with it, but there’s also no need to rush it.
I Always Write About You Another poem for Priscilla. I wish I had taken the time to get the avocados. I miss the conversations about Kafka, making fun of Ayn Rand, and spending hours on Capitol Hill in the philosophy section of that used bookstore, and going to Pike Place as a local. Everything else is kept on the perimeter, at arms length just out of reach. Everything else is nothing and my soul cries out for that insane energy to tell me it's all a lie. That life hasn't gone on. Just a nightmare under the eucalyptus tree. But a nightmare has faded edges and this is a sharp stab in my spine.
One of Those Days The battery on my Lenovo is dead. There are no outlets. I dig through my backpack, pull out my mini Moleskine, rummage deeper for a pen, to find a blue Pilot Precise that had exploded covered in its own sticky ink.
What do you do? When the new you baffles your oldest allies? When you are pushed away because you are stronger? Or worse yet, because you were once weak? When you are a whole being preferred in pieces? When you push away out of fear of sincerity?
Insomniac Worry Insomnia for days. Panic attacks and scars, cannabis makes it worse. Emerging connection runs away from the idiocracy I can't seem to shake. Start over or give up? Leaning towards the latter. I'll fill myself up instead on bad poetry and stories where I am a better person. Lost in the illusion of freedom when really there's just nothing left to lose.
Ultra Independence There is a frosty fear in my soul that seeks the warmth of the hearth of childhood. But there is no home to return to, there never was unless I made it. I need to be self-made, self-assured, self-contained, self-aware. And I can only cry out in the dead of night like the child I never got to be.
Evacuation Insomniac and struggling, I sit in the bathroom of my dated hotel room smoking a Bento pre-roll wondering: what the fuck is next? The plague runs its course and the world burns. Will everything I've worked for be turned to cinders? What of those whose lives already have?
Chestnut Cowboy 