I thought if I conviced her I had nothing to say

My mother would stop insisting I write.

                                                                        Words were my enemy

Jabbing my brain with their sharp seriffed feet

Scarring papers with my crude interpretations of their distorted shapes

I vainly tried to mash terms together

Like awkward puzzle pieces that did not quite fit

                                                                       The 'right' vocabulary was lost on me;

Pleas to be freed from the pages were stubbornly denied

It was foolish to think I could escape words

They are the very abstract that holds concrerte reality together

The ultimate paradox that provides vagueness and clarity to life

                                                                        I was caught up in the nuance of the language

Where every sentence

Every imperfect vocabulary term

Butchered my story with a knife sharp enough

To convince me I had nothing valueable to say

                                                                         Which led to my failure to recognize

Words do not have to form sentences

Contrived, straining to tell a story 

In such great depth the moral is lost

I found poetry to be liberating;

                                                                           Words derive meaning based on the emotion I write them with;

I could finally speak

Without feeling the twist of the knife

Or creating misshapen ill-fitting puzzled pictures

I have so much to say

                                                                             Words are my friends.

I think if I tried to convince her I had nothing to say

My mother would laugh and ask me why I kept writing.