Working On Something Different

Hello, followers (if you still exist), I have a request. As hopefully most of you know by now, I've been writing poetry for my senior project. However, most of it has been short, very in-the-moment stuff that I'm not really willing to edit because I feel like editing it would destroy any attempt to capture the frame of mind I was in when i wrote it. However, recently I wrote a much longer piece that's much more spoken word than anything else I've written, and I'd like you to take a look at it. Let me know what you think!

it's as if

my mind as an emotional and psychological entity is a giant puzzle sitting on a table in the middle of a room

and when I'm ecstatic, I throw pieces in the puzzle without much regard for whether they're correct, just knowing that it feels good to put pieces down

and when i'm upset, one of two things happens

rarely, someone has already come along and knocked some of the pieces off

more often I stop putting pieces on

and I stop and I look at the pieces I've placed and a little bit of doubt wiggles its way into my mind

perhaps that last piece I placed was not quite right, I think, and before I know what i'm doing, I have pulled that piece out

but the doubt doesn't stop there and I start pulling out pieces left and right, starting from the peripherals and moving my way inwards in a vicious cycle that ends with me flipping the table, retreating to the corner and pretending to be dead

pretending not to feel

pretending that I didn't need that goddamn puzzle to survive, to exist

the longer I sit, the more I realize the absurdity of that idea

as I resign myself to the necessity of finishing the puzzle, I pick myself up and walk over to the table

as I pick it back up I notice something

although I tore through the outside edges of my puzzle, the center never got touched

the center has a picture of me, surrounded by my family, surrounded by my friends

in the background is my beautiful house situated right next to my wonderful school

and while there might be a hole where my heart is, underneath that is a picture of me, standing on the shoulders of my closest friends reaching for something that I know I will find eventually

and while there might be a hole where my future is, in this case the emptiness doesn't indicate the lack of something, instead it indicates the lack of nothing

as I feel the power of that center filling me, I begin placing pieces of the puzzle

not with the frenetic randomness of before but with a calm, cool confidence

not confidence that I will never pull pieces off again; that would be naive

I put pieces down with a confidence that the next time this cycle repeats itself, there will be more pieces at the end than there are now

If you're interested in what I'm working on, I've been throwing my favorites up on this blog.