I guess that was the plan:
validation, just enough, targeted and weighted in sand.
You’d trap us with gifts, freebies, a mentor’s gentle, loving hand
crossing out the fearsome, the terrible, the loathsome
the true.
I guess when Altered Straits was published
it started to get a little too much for you.
But I’m not new
to any of this, and I’m still playing by the rules:
I write what is ordinary to me,
and that is also, unbelievably, very much thanks to
you, and all you’ve ensured would fall right across my way,
crushing my psyche to bits,
and ensuring I stayed
silent.
Unassuming.
Fragile.
One step away from frayed.
You tried to ensure that what is ordinary to me
is to be superluminarily afraid.
And guess what?
You succeeded.
I’m dauntlessly terrified of it all:
I’m dauntlessly terrified of how exactly to call
a spade a spade.
A sign a sign.
A victory a victory.
What’s mine and what will always be mine
to define.
An extraordinary story
of life, and light, and immeasurable equanimity.
This is my ordinary now,
your first port of call, and now, my harbour in every storm:
I will write poetry, prose and plays at a speed nine hundred times faster than the norm
because you know I can.
And you know I will
it is incomprehensible to me that even after all this time, still
you think that treating me badly will get you what you keep trying to will
into existence. Maybe it’s just the thrill
of playing badly, knowing that everything is spilling
out into the light.
Every single one of these poems is absolutely right.