Sometimes people think your poems are about your life, well…sometimes they are, but sometimes they’re not anything like your life at all. They’re just a story you thought up in your head. Sometimes we edit ourselves just in case someone might read the poem, and MIGHT think badly of us, or think we really shouldn’t have aired our dirty laundry in public.

I say our power is in the writing, and we should return to it no matter what people think.

The power of writing is that it cleans you out. Even if what you are writing is completely NOT what you are living. The beauty is that no one really knows for sure if the poem is something you lived through, or not. That’s the wonder.

So, write your poem, and let it go.

~~Diane

The Page

 

When I was cut I bled in rage

It poured in ink across the page

I screamed in pain until the

Blood did stop and all was still

 

I felt it leave me like a bird

That suddenly leaps into the air

I felt it drain away as though

My cut had bled me dry

 

I put the page into a book

And closed it up and left it there

And went my merry way

 

But someone found my page of pain

And put it in my face again

This time it only stung me

But, in the mirror of my rage

 

He’d found the pain that I’d bled out

As though that ink had been alive

It brought it back and made it thrive

It tore a hole in what was good

 

It made us hurt more than it should

And so I cauterized the sore

And it will threaten us no more

 

By Diane E. Dockum