Sometimes my poems discover themselves about halfway through.
The line that ended up being the title of this one actually came to me first–that doesn’t happen often, and when it does the rest of the poem rarely fits any kind of structure, but I like to preserve the original spark if I can. That’s part of what poetry is, I think; inspiration comes in a word or an idea, and if you follow, it’ll take you places.
Life Is Just One Big Waiting Room
We dedicate entire rooms to it,
sterile spaces carved out
in pleasing rectangles, something to catch the eye
and tether the mind
to its predictable corners.
There is comfort in predicability,
in earth-toned paint and
coarse carpet that doesn’t protest unmeasured
footfalls. Paint on walls won’t betray you,
not like people.
Our skin is less like paint than carpet
running in patches of rough,
sometimes smooth,
knit together layer by layer.
Its seams only appear when damaged,
layers pulling apart just so to reveal
the raw underneath. We spill out
red between the cracks
until the pain extracts itself from out bodies,
observable from a safe distance,
leaving tissue to be rewoven, scars
marking the places where our humanity once escaped.
