what they mean

There was a time when I wrote too much to know what I was writing.

The same poems over and over again. Nothing much changes, over years, save the length of the sentence fragments and how they are arranged. When will the rhythm change, the same inflection and flatness masquerading as profundity. Perhaps this is what they call finding your voice. I gag a little. Oranges drying on radiators, tumbleweeds of dog hair, hands, show up time and again. I wonder if I will ever be rid of them. I cannot write the traditional verse, the metered rhyme that gallops without a care of where its hooves land. I am not angry enough to speak the words the way the others do, spitting salt without watching where it falls and makes fallow the earth. They are too long. They are too short. They sigh a little when I say, I have another one, at the reading circle. I read them to a friend. They’re good, they say, but I don’t get it.

Not everyone will understand you. And you will not always understand yourself. But these days, I write enough to know that I mean these words. I would not take them back to where they came from, even when I do not always know what they mean.

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© 2015 Anna-Christina Betekhtin, All Rights Reserved.