Faking It Because I Don’t Think I’m Making It: Two Poems

I haven’t written in awhile, a whole month and nearly a half, in fact. I haven’t felt enough in love with the opposite sex, with my own gender identity or with the world to express an opinion on it. April was very hard, full of difficult lessons that I’ll write about when I’ve had time to sort them out in my mind. I did try writing poems.

And in the meantime, one continues to keep breathing. And with this one, the best of those breaths speak poetry aloud, even if they’re all fiction. Here are two pieces I performed recently, both of which are entirely fictitious. I’ve never had anyone that I felt enough hope with, to ride through an unglamorous season 2 with. That is the crux of the piece that I call ‘Patchwork Relationship‘. Considering the response it usually gets, I imagine that enough of other people have felt this. I guess a writer’s job is to hold a mirror up to humanity, even if they can’t see themselves in it.

By the way, the night I performed this, I was very, very sick. I threw up several times before I went up on stage. And after I came back home, I spent the night dry-heaving, too weak to stand. I thought it was possible I wouldn’t make it through the night and that I might choke on my puke. As it turned out, I didn’t. The performance is the only time that stands out in that day as shining clear, feeling one with the universe and okay with life. The stage is my second blog now. I feel like the true me up there and like everything else is an act I’m putting on. Even when what I’m performing is entirely fictitious.

The second piece is one I wrote and read out at the Hive’s Great Indian Poetry Challenge. You’re given a prompt and one hour to come up with an original poem. My prompt was ‘Wrong Time’. A new friend observed that I usually wrote ranty, angry, feminist poetry and he challenged/suggested/coaxed me to try something different. And he was just so sweet about it that I wanted to go along. So here I am, fictioning it up again with ‘Wrong Time’. For fact, this is probably how my two steady relationships went – my holding up the glory and sparkle and magic above the mundanity that each man was trying to force upon me. I lost in both cases but the memory remains. I don’t know if I’ll ever want to do that again for any other human being (two is quite enough pounds of flesh that the universe has extracted from me, don’t you think?). Now I’m a writer, so I can make shameless use of all of it in poetry.

*Read my other Love Poetry. Or listen to it.