I used to think writing,
was a creative line,
drawn in the dark, in bed,
my nightly poetry spillage,
more heart than head.

Now it’s scraps,
held together with footnotes,
some citation half-remembered,
in the shower,
gone as fast as it entered.

I tell people I’m writing,
Even if it feels like stuff and fluff,
shredded cloth,
a head full of lint and filing,
uncatalogued.

I call it research,
I call it a project,
I call it something,
a working title,
and a deadline that tastes of metal.

Some days it’s almost a poem,
the shape of it,
a syllable here, a fragment that’s good,
tethered to my arguments,
the stuff I make understood.

There are hours,
when I’m as bright as a pin,
spine straight,
sentences unravelling,
like thread.

Other days I am all stuffing,
a soft hollow,
where a poet used to be,
trying to explain what I’m doing,
and why it matters.

I am still writing,
I tell myself,
just differently,
a thousand small pieces of fluff,
I am the seamstress of this stuff.

REF: I-29072025-0