Poet's Block

For those who've ever wondered

why I write:

what else was I supposed to do 

on the cold nights

my heart was a snowstorm

and "the love of my life"

was the ring bearer of my strife?

And what else was I supposed to do

on the overcast days

my mind was overwrought

with racing thoughts 

that this time when my mother ran away 

where ever she had gone would be the place

her body would have to stay?

And what else was I supposed to do 

to understand Sylvia Plath

and the way the universe's wrath

over her life matched my own?

How was I supposed to get that

Sylvia and I

are sisters born of instability?

And I don't write poetry

only to exhibit the fact that I'm angst-y.

I write because I'm loving,

you see,

I got a love for plants

that can only be expressed through the careful craft of words.

That love

creeps up my body like ivy

and gets me rooted in the Earth.

And I got a love for Ginsberg and Koyczan and Gibson.

I love 'em so much I wanna be them.

And I know that I can't,

but I can take steps to be like them

and to do that, I gotta take the page 

and put to it my pen.

And I got a love for the way the keyboard sounds

when I got ideas.

A symphony of rhythm

Bach couldn't have written

even if he tried.

I love the sound of 'backspace'

and its finality: click. click. click.

And I write because of nothing

I write because of everything

I write because of all the in-betweens

I write because of every outlier

I write because it keeps me still

I write because it keeps me moving forward on every journey

I write because I'm faithful

I write because I'm faithless

I write because I am the epitome of contradiction

and it's difficult to understand the juxtaposition

of my being

when I'm still trying to grasp what's concrete about me.

So

I write poetry for learning

and all of my soul-searching.

To put it simply

I write poetry 

because it's my identity.