Vigilant to tool and bet
I make rounded in a shapely alphabet,
the woodwork.
Gouge me a line
out of line: so much for
the raptor’s claws, the frugal hands,
the borrowed plot,
halting in a lie. I’m southbound.
Where ought I to be?
To upholster an enduring seat
to sit and heave off lines
subtle hues awakened by a narrow fever:
carve them impartial, heavy and unkind.
I hold onto words not akin
but where I find my call—
oh, the shapes of sounds
make wounds of intention, I stall
idioms, the people’s causes, their sure formations.
All the while, I skulk, not unwittingly
along my trampled path
caught on fire.
This poem is about the anxieties that gather at the site of writing. Writing has never
come easily to me; every choice feels deliberate, almost overthought. Yet this desire
to make informed decisions sits uneasily with the fact that I have made the largest
decisions (writing primarily in a language that is not my mother tongue) in a way that
will always feel fraught. The poem explores the guilt that arises from this
contradiction through interconnected imagery that touches on different modes of
creation. It is self-aware, much like guilt itself, so it gives the stage to an ongoing
dialogue between the self that insisted on choosing carefully, the one that is
enamoured with the English language yet never at ease, never at home, and the self
that recognizes how this choice might trouble me in many ways.
I always commit to preserving the strangeness of language in my writing, and this poem is an example of that.
