For the Republic of Letters

I am not a writer. 

I spent the first 90% of my life training to be a dancer, the last three years in two different art schools, in two different countries. My life has been permeated by the pursuit of that unique kind of vulnerability and release made readily available through art. Everything I’ve ever performed, painted, drawn and sewn I’ve put on display. Still somehow, my poems and (generally rambling) pseudo journals have remained password protected on a computer. I am not a writer, but I write incessantly, and somehow the awareness that no one will ever see that part of me isn’t as comforting as it used to be.

 So here I’ll post my various letters to myself, and now, if anyone is reading, my letters to you.

One.

In time, in time

In smooth red wine

I would set the world alight –

How could I know of these cloudy mornings and

Desultory nights

Insensate conversations and

A lull before the stair, I would descend

Into a shrinking chaos,

Expanding empire of

Bleach-blonde hair

Is to grow up, to grow aware or

Weary of our selves?

And I leave home

To live alone

Explain my unemployment on the phone.

Is to grow older, to grow wise or

Tired of opening our eyes?

My tarnished dreams, they ever seem

As though I heard them long ago

Before I fell asleep

And long ago

I knew myself, and what I’d be –

This disregard, this

Discontent

This restlessness that beckons me to flee,

These passions, terrors drenched

In smooth red wine

Float to the surface only in the wake of

Crawling time

In the North they take a year to build a ship

Store within it, dreams

Until the last,

Until, released into relentless waters

Flaming arrows fall over the mast.