Spring and Process

It seems like so long ago that processed everything with paper and pen or a keyboard. Someone suggested when I started struggling with writing that perhaps my was of processing information and emotion might be undergoing a change. I have given much thought to that suggestion over time, and might find it true, except for one thing. I still write in my head all the time but the process of making words fine the cement of ink rarely occurs anymore.

I think something inside me went to sleep for a winter season. At this point, not writing is as much of a habit as it became once to write. It feels foreign and I can't stand it.

I started journaling regularly when I was 12 years old. I remember it being a huge part of how I dealt with my grandfather's death the following year. When my health battle started at age 14 poetry sprang from places I never wanted to know. I've started about a hundred different short stories that have no endings...most of them have no middles either. As a young teen, I wrote nine chapters (by hand) of a book. I was really committed to it until about nine months later when I decided that it was a completely immature storyline. I was right; the storyline was childish, however, in retrospect and with more experience (though I haven't glanced at that for a couple years), the writing was not all that bad.

Somewhere along the line I learned that I am a poet. I like to say, and often do, that I am fantastically unknown. I think and experience life in half sentences, without rules. I use capital letters for effect or shock value, I make up words, challenge imagery, and always find the syllabic break down of a sentence or phrase more appealing to me than whatever is being said.

I haven't written a "good" poem in a long, long time. I miss the way I used to connect to the world and am terrified that it may never never be how it used to be. At the very same time though, I have high hopes this spring might give birth to my creative process.