Poetry has been a bit thin on the ground for me lately. Which is weird, because after high school, before I graduated from college, it used to be all the writing that I was most proud of in my life.
And before that I was afraid to write anything–mainly because I didn’t want people reading it. I’m too much of a perfectionist. I didn’t like to think of people judging my heart like that. I didn’t like to think of trying to write something just so that people would applaud me.
Learning to write poetry changed my perspective on a lot of that. I found a lot of freedom in it, in the loose chain-linking of words. My favorite poems I ever wrote–or read–came from nowhere and ended up somewhere else entirely. I couldn’t look too hard at them, lest they disappear.
Poetry is a way of thinking around oneself–that’s why I think everyone should write it.
At the time I wrote this poem (around the end of my first year of college) I was stuck in a bit of melancholy. Writing it felt like a tiny rebellion.
Yellow Coat
The music is a story
to her.
Its bright, deliberate vibrations bounce
off her yellow coat,
singing of the sunset she wears.
Buckled black shoes,
step lightly, circling puddles
and leaves that lie downtrodden,
pressed into pavement
by the weight of persistent raindrops.
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