Words climb against my larynx

and punch at my mouth,

but I screw my lips shut

and force myself to swallow this alphabet

lump in my throat.

Thousands of letters and punctuation marks

tumble into my stomach and boil

with gastrointestinal acids

and my fear of speaking up.

 

Double, double, toil and trouble,

suppression burns and my body bubbles.

I cannot contain these As, Bs, Cs –

commas, periods, apostrophes

find each other to form sentences –

rising and prodding my lips apart

until I throw them all up

onto pages of lined notebook paper –

forming

a poem.

 

Heaving, spewing, hurling, gagging

on feelings

manifests into pieces of myself,

images of the past, present, and future,

a means of expression

and intention,

of emptying pain and my worry stew.

Wordsworth, Whitman, Rilke, Plath reveal

beauty in contemplation and

confession of the self –

and I vomit more Is, Ms, Es,

more poetry, more poetry.

 

I float in Yeats’ Lake Isle of Innisfree,

and tread through Frost’s woods.

I ride on Dickinson’s carriage,

and sit in Bishop’s waiting room.

Their words I digest –  

making myself full and brave again

on poetry. Like Eliot’s Prufrock, I now ask,

“Do I dare?”

Pen in hand, blank page below,

I dare.