Why is it so
That writing puts the sadness at bay,
Temporarily, yet when I tumble too far
Into the pit of darkness that has been
Swallowing me whole,
I just cannot bear to write
Not even one flimsy word?
Anything that brings me joy
Was abandoned long ago,
Writing too was left out with the trash.
Yet, on a November day
I picked up the forgotten pen,
Dug out my notebook,
And began to write.
What sparked me to write
Out of all things that I had given up?
I began to write even though
It had been years since I last
Had written a thing
Not for school.
Words had not always called out to me,
I am not going to sugarcoat it
With a flip of the hair
As everyone seems to do.
I stumbled over words as a young child,
Mixing words up,
Pronouncing words like caterpillar
As cal-lee-pillar.
Until about the third grade,
I hated reading,
Absolutely positively hated the
Once was frustrating activity of reading and writing.
Yet, once I discovered this-
This world of wonderful words,
I was hooked.
I tore through book after book
With hungry eyes,
Wanting more and more stories
And worlds that sparked my imagination.
As I got older,
And fell more in love
With books to wrap their story
Around my brain,
Allowing these spun words
To pull me in,
Immersing me in a world, a life
Better than my own
To get lost in.
Eventually, I discovered the joys of writing,
Still being an avid reader-
The idea of making worlds of my own
Excited me.
I too, got lost in the stories I spun on my own,
In time I found poetry and its beauty,
How relieving it was-
Pushing feelings and tumbling thoughts
Into an array of grouped lines.
Yet its beauty and relief was not enough
To prevent all of the words
From ceasing to go on.
When I pushed my joys
Into a locked chest,
Writing was the first to go.
And so was my smile,
My true smile.
