#crowdsourcing like a true tumblr-assigned poet tonight

[persnicketypansy]

I’m trying to write a poem but I can’t get it to go right. I keep writing lines like

I make myself tea/tomorrow my sister/dead dog in the driveway/depression is

A cicada is trying to kill itself against the window glass of my kitchen - which isn’t a metaphor but it sure as hell sounds like one. I’m trying to write about depression and how it’s a cold room with a single warm spot on the floorboards. That’s not right, though. My poetry instructor would say i was unfocused, distracted (by the cicada, if I’m being honest) or at least probably if I’d ever had an instructor that’s what they would say.

poetry has always been about the smallest amount of words to create the biggest, brightest picture. It’s always been a way to put a feeling into words - look, it’s a river I’m pouring into your hands. Do you get it yet?

In the simplest words, the fewest lines, the rawest sketch of an image, imagine me young and sad. Now imagine me now, older and happy. Now pretend that the two images are exactly the same. Did I move forward or did everything else just move away from me? Bead on a string, is the bead moving or is the string? But how do you write that out? How do you make it something digestible?

The cicada is very loud. Bugs skeeve me out.

when I was young I thought happiness was bigger than the sky (do you get it? how big the sky was to me when I was seven years old? the sky was an ancient whale going to swallow me out of the wildflowers. what did that make happiness?)

young went away. now only I remain (I don’t know what to make of this; i shed my youth like a skin. a cicada shell, if you will, now that the thing outside in the dark has finished its fitful dying)

when young had me, I was sad. These things were not connected, except by knots I tied (i wasn’t sad because i was young; young was a well i dug to hold all the sad I already had)

but the sadness went with the child. they live together in the hollow green garden (where the birds sing, you remember the poem about lost children? child me wrote it on her arms and legs. she looked for birds to chase)

I drink tea (and somehow, even though my seven year old self will never believe it, this is happiness)

Idk tho. im still missing an important part of the puzzle. sadness leaves and there’s room for something else in your life suddenly. happiness sneaks up on you. happiness and sadness aren’t opposites (they’re yuri) not like in inside out, but like in a ‘happiness is a survival technique’ way. once you grow up you can’t be sad the same way a child is sad anymore, because you’ve got defense mechanisms in place

sometimes you miss the sadness, the way it just swallows all of you up, but then you make some tea and remember that child you would have killed to be where you are right now, and things are better. the whole (that was a dark time once) (this will be a dark time someday as well) things get better - not things get better, but things are better. child me was wrong about what I needed. what I have now is enough to get by. optimism?

is the point optimism? idk. something something, savor what fulfills you instead of trying to satisfy the ideals you came up with when you were young, because child you doesn’t know shit about a good cup of tea or a four hour conversation with a friend. you don’t owe your past self the satisfaction of all their unrealistic dreams.

child me wanted to get stolen by a bird

like. i don’t know. i’ll come back to this