occasional Asides #1

from time to time / extra work will appear

I keep all my rejections on index cards. That process began with a book filled over a three-year period, then ceremoniously shredded. This was how I discovered Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria was a legitimate condition. It's how I freed myself from the tyranny of other people's ideas of what poetry is supposed to be 'for'. This is a journey where experimentation is more significant than success.

this is the permanent flagellation / the penance / the playing of a longer game

My Grandmother told me that spider plants rarely flowered, if at all, that they were impossible to kill, that all that mattered to them was finding the right home to be settled in. A few years back, the youngest came back with a runner they'd been given by a woman who blew glass at the local craft barn, that they were curious if it would grow for them. I've started 15 plants from that single runner.

It wanted to live.

I need to communicate, all the time, often to the detriment of my sanity. It is a compulsion. There have been significant periods of my life when I was non-verbal by choice in social situations. That becomes an internal balance. Having now properly developed coping mechanisms and a means by which historic trauma can be regulated, how I choose to speak is becoming less destructive.

the plant / that did not bud before / is the reminder / everything may yet bloom

the danger / will always be yourself / without a proper means / of regulation

That rejection above came on Tuesday: I saw a press asking for subs the day before. I didn't check what their house style was. Instead we simply submitted the things I'm most proud of right now, the stuff that has granted satisfaction and closure. Some poetry isn't for reading aloud, it's for being objective with and then accepting how little you have in common with the person who wrote it.

I will never actively diss another poet's work. There's always good that can be found in everything: if not a stanza, a phrase, if not a phrase, a single word. The key to being unwound from the tyranny of my own existence was the acceptance that sometimes, saying nothing is where the greatest power lies. Knowing that all you can do sometimes is sit and let it all wash over you has to be enough.

yearning / for what I wish had once been seen / might have been said / is pain

I sat for an hour after the rejection and remembered how it felt not to be noticed as a kid, how lonely it was to be in spaces and not allowed to exist as myself. The past and the future seamlessly overlapped. I know the people who try and pretend I'm not here, that my voice is not important. They do not get to control what I am any more. I take their anger and my regret and level them into a horizon.

there / it cannot hurt me / I am ahead of the beyond / and will remain / whole