I can I know

It’s 2018 and I’m on my third, maybe fourth, attempt at college.

I’ve graduated high school nearly 9 years ago.

I enrolled in several classes that spring semester at CUNY, immediately dropping all but two. Yoga, and Creative Writing.

I was not built for the school life, but I was determined to try again.

Maybe earning a college degree would make my life worth living? Maybe the journey getting there would be a reason to keep on living? Maybe somewhere along the way I’d figure out why I was living?

Maybe this time around I wouldn’t take a bottle of pills when the workload inevitably became too overwhelming.

I loved to write, and I was good at it too, so the class was an easy enough choice. And yoga was yoga. But give me an assignment and a deadline and all bets are off.

I do not do well under pressure.

But I do not do anything at all without pressure.

It’s a tricky balance to find.

The night before this poem was due, amidst a cloud of anxiety and another of smoke, I got to work.

I remember this poem as the one that made me believe I needed to be high in order to write anything worth writing.

I remember writing this poem, sitting on a green plastic chair in my bedroom at my parent’s house in Brooklyn, NY.

I remember reading this poem, out loud, during workshop the next day in class. It was my first time ever doing something like that.

I was terrified. I did really well.

This poem means a lot to me. In some ways, it was my first. In more ways, realer ways, it was not. I’d written dozens of poems over the years.

But it signifies something, for sure. And I am still figuring out exactly what that is.

Yet Space Can Not Contain

Anger rages, coursing through.

Veins too thin, too young.

Unequipped to deal with what is meant for souls much older.

Turmoil, pain.

A swirling mix of colors, feelings, ideas.

So much going on in so small a space.

Weeks, months, years pass by.

It’s only been hours in time.

A lifetime of lessons learned before they were due.

Wear and tear, lines of age.

So new, yet so old.

The past and the future merge.

Confusion. Noise. Fog.

A thickness hanging on a wisp of air.

Relentless, it will not rest.

It rushes, it roars, it spreads.

Fills the space that was never there.

Darkness takes over in the absence of light.

4/23/18

This poem means a lot to me.

It’s not my first poem.

It doesn’t rhyme.

It’s not fake.

I never did graduate.