the power of words

In high school I did not fit in. My only friends were drug addicts. We shared bond of the addicted. My drug of choice was poetry. I craved it. I inhaled it. Poetry woke me up in the middle of the night and distracted me during the day. I wrote mosaics of poetry into the frame of my sleeping loft. I scribbled poetry furiously during lectures. I covered my notebooks with it. I bleached it into my clothes with Q-tips dipped in Clorox.

Our lives were allusions. There was so much more than the words written on the page. Sitting in a VW bug late at night with the front wheels rolled down the boat ramp and into Lake Jackson. Music from the Heart of Space would be on the radio and we would turn on the headlights and watch the mist roll off the water and swell over the hood and my best friend would be high and transcending and I would be sober and watching and letting the moment turn into a single image that would haunt me until I wrote its poetry down.

I dated a boy who was not a poet but who wrote a poem about me anyway. He was very proud of how deep his poem was. In his poem, he said that I was a white picket fence. Do you get it? He could explain. See, I was not a wall because I had slats and spaces a person could look through to catch a glimpse. And of course, I had a gate - a gate that would be opening for him. When I found a box ( a BIG box, a Sams Warehouse size box) of condoms in his glove compartment I said “I hope these are not for me” but I knew that this was what he meant by calling me a fence with a gate. I broke up with him. It was not that simple.

The thing about poetry is this. The poem does not symbolize meaning. The poem is the meaning. If I was a fence - if I had a gate there was not an explanation. A gate is not a vagina. A vagina is a gate. You can not write poetry with reverse engineering.

When I was addicted to poetry, it was because there was no other way to record reality. There were no explanations for the things I did or the way I felt. When I read stories or papers that I wrote as a young adult, I am often embarrassed by the immaturity or pretentiousness of them. There is no truth in them. I was not a sentence with correct capitalization and subject verb agreement. My life was not an organized and well written paragraph that supported a thesis. When I read over my old poems, it is like looking at a photograph. They are what I was. I am there - between the words and inside the metaphors.

I wrote my last poem a few weeks after my husband and I started dating. Somehow, my metaphors lost their truth. I have found that I am more comfortable now writing essays. I am comfortable stating a thesis and supporting it with structured details. I find it easier to express my thoughts using complete sentences with subjects and verbs. I am a noun. I can be modified. There are definitions and rules. The rules are usually followed.

My children are the poets now. My daughter says to me “You are the best mommy I have ever had”. This is her truth. I tease her. I say “Really? Am I better that all your other mommies?” She looks at me with complete understanding and she answers simply: "“Yes"”.