My Poetic Injustice

“As darkness falls, she whispers words too frail for those to hear.” This was the first line of the first stanza of a poem that I cannot remember any more of. As much as I can’t remember that poem I also feel estranged from the words I wrote. A poem I wrote for an honors English class contest seems to ruminate in my memory, but why only that line? Maybe these words were a premonition of the passion I would let go of. A love I would lose. That would just slip away without a goodbye. Those words as I read them now are like a hot steel blade, cutting through a seal and opening a deep understanding of my loss. Once a poet, once a writer, my pen has been lain dormant. My words have gone frail becoming only a whisper of what I once was. Writing for me was a way for me to understand the soul of who I am. A way for me to speak when I couldn’t breath and understand the complexities of who I was becoming. I won the contest that was written to describe a woman’s last moments of breath. I never realized what a foreshadowing that line would be. Once I wrote poetry in a fervent fashion, and somehow my passion died. It had faded away. A part of me ceased to exist and I am just realizing it as these words dance about on my screen and circle around in my head. Writing for me is a very personal journey. A very emotional and destructive beauty. Yet I have forgotten its face. And it seems to have faded away. We were in love, my pen and I. It was all of what I couldn’t be, it spoke the words I felt I myself couldn’t speak. It was my other half. How did I lose such a deeply rooted passion without so much as noticing it was gone? My writing has been a long road of personal revelations and healing. The sentence of that high school poem will go on to represent the death and rebirth of what writing is to me.

I could smell the coconut from the shampoo in her hair. The sweet smell embraced me and comforted me becoming a familiar warmth I would always remember. My cheek pressed against hers, we would lie down against a bed of pillows and I would ingest her sweet voice as she read to me. My mother always traced the words she read with her finger so I could see the words and what they looked like as she read them. Her contentedness and enthusiasm burned warm memories in my heart. I began to love to read. How exiting words were. How amazing that they make you feel, that they bring to the forefront the unknown, I loved how they inspired thought and imagination in me.

I watched my mother read every day, often reading an entire novel in a day on many occasions. She was very passionate about reading and read in all her free time. In her footsteps I read as often as I could. In grade school what I loved most were the scholastic books reading contests that my school would have. I would enter and win many times. I always felt so proud when I completed reading a stack of books. I was a pretty wild child with a lot of energy. I bounced around the house and in life. My father was a musician and was the very first to introduce me to lyrical writing. This song and poetry was so inviting. I remember watching my father practice playing his guitar. He wrote ferocious notes with his fingertips. One night as he played his fingertips began to bleed. The drops splashing onto the wood of his acoustic guitar but he didn’t stop. I said “Daddy, you are bleeding!” to my surprise he said, “I almost got it, just a little bit more” and he continued to play. My father’s hands were calloused and strong. And they created these enchanted strings of words that came to life and could be experienced in a way that sparked the flames of different emotions. It made you feel.

Words became a commonality between my mother and father though there was nothing connected about them. My parents both chose to connect with me in different ways revolving around the deliverance and art of words in various forms. I soon fell in love and at the age of five as my father played a melody on his acoustic guitar I free versed my first song. The first song I ever wrote was so important to me. I had created a picture with my words. Created a feeling and emotion. My lyrics consisted of custody battle verses and contained deep expressions of love and despair and the hope and promise of a new day. I was only five years old and nothing in my songs reflected that. Here I had found a way to speak when I couldn’t speak, a way to feel and pick apart my thoughts. I began to write and sing constantly. I felt less alone and had truly found a friend. My parents had given me an immortal gift. A gift of encouragement to read and write and create. Something that couldn’t die as my father did when I was seven, or so I thought.

I fell in love with the written verse. Largely influenced by my parents, it is the part of them that always lives on with me but how did I lose sight of it? I once believed but as I am writing this I can feel her coming alive inside of me. The other self. I feel like I have awakened a once sleeping passion and slowly it arises in me, brushing the dust from its eyes and staring back at me as if to say” I have been waiting, where have you been?” I was nineteen years old. I wasn’t writing as much as I used to but I had entered a poem I had written when I was sixteen into a contest and was published online at Poetry.com.

At that point writing was still a part of my life. I didn’t realize that I would soon experience my voice being stripped away from me. I was attacked and assaulted one night off campus from a Job Corps center I was attending for culinary arts. I can’t bring myself to talk about the details but I was dehumanized, I felt my power die. My voice felt ripped from my throat like when Ariel gives her voice to the sea witch in The Little Mermaid. What made things worse for me was that no one protected me. Not the police when I called, not my friends after I returned from the hospital. No one. I wasn’t heard. I was viciously hurt but no one acknowledged it. I felt worthless and numb. I had spent my whole life being open in my writing. Healing and hoping only to have it all taken away in a moment. My once bouncing lyric went still and I became artistically motionless. Was this what took my passion away? This even seems to have taken from me a part of myself that used to truly speak. I stopped writing and was really depressed. I spent the rest of my teen years in darkness searching for some form of light. It was if I had forgotten who I even was. I became the ultimate victim and never fully realized I had survived. It would be a long time before I wrote again.

The first thing I ever wrote again was in a class. I was twenty-seven years old. It wasn’t personal, it was opinionated and scholastic. I slinked around and wasn’t myself. I tried to be unseen and unattainable. How could I connect with something so intimate as poetry when I wanted to remain invisible and in the dark? There were things I was not ready to see and explore. I was sinking into a comfortable nothingness. I had let them take my poetry from me and allowed a great injustice to be placed upon myself. I had survived many things but for some reason the severity of this event crippled me.

I began to write again, but only for a couple of days. I was estranged from myself and it was as if someone else was writing and not me. It was nothing like I was. It wasn’t the truth of who I was it was the lie. I had to break free from my prison. I felt desperate and I wasn’t sure what to do so I decided I would do the one thing I felt was really holding me back and that was to write about the event but as I would have. In brutal honesty, I wrote with a beautiful brutality about the images of that night. The shadows and shades of places I didn’t want to go were brought to light in a metaphorical statement of how I felt and what that meant and how I was going to feel again. The passion had come alive in me again.

I would soon learn that this would come and go with my different fears and anxieties and I began to stop writing every time I was overwhelmed. Being overwhelmed and full of emotion was usually a prerequisite for my writing and now I was fleeing from it. I had begun writing at such a young age I hadn’t realized how much of a part of who I am it was. It wasn’t until I lost my passion for writing that I truly gained my voice. I pushed myself to be honest and feel the pain. As a little girl with my cheek pressed up against my mother's, or my ears and voice tuned to my father’s guitar I felt safe. Out here in my world of verses and rhyme schemes I was exposed and vulnerable. I knew I had to try and that I had to get my voice back so I began to journal and write a freestyle of poetry once I day. I thought I had found my place again but it too would fade. I see my writing now as the waves. Crashing around me momentarily with a fierce and brief enveloping. I learned to embrace this fear of writing and understand it as a fear of seeing myself fully. I still struggle to this day at the ripe old age of thirty-four. I let go of a love but found the courage to seek it out again, to give it a second chance. To give myself a second chance. Writing and I were together once again harmoniously exploring my life and my pains.