day 7 – oops. i accidentally got high and started typing

This morning I went digging through some old journals and found a strange little nugget. Not gold, per se. Not gold at all, actually. It’s more like a chunk of mica. And so, today, we are hopping in my time machine and going back to the year 2011, which was, by all appearances, an introspective year. And I suppose it would have been, because I’d just moved to London for the first time and there were many “what the fuck?” moments.

When I first I read these scribblings, the critic stepped in hard. “WHAT A LOAD OF SELF-INDULGENT SHIT,” she said. Harsh, I know. The critic speaks in CAPS, always. Because it wants to be heard above everything and everyone else. Having said that, the critic is kind of right in this  instance. This poem (?) is nothing incendiary. In fact, it’s the very opposite of incendiary. But that’s not the point, dear friends.

My point, my point? Ah yes! Here it is. I like looking back at this stuff, no matter how much it makes me cringe, because it gives me perspective (albeit a marijuana induced one).  In the sense that, if you are still writing about the same shit two years down the line, you better check yo’self, honey. Otherwise, just consider it part of the human experience. The beauty lies in witnessing the evolution (hopefully) throughout the years and accepting those layers and those stories and those first drafts, which have stacked up to make you who you are today (including the cheesy poems and the embarrassing moments).

The truth is, everyone has one of these streams of consciousness (and 99% of the time, it’s about a boy) written on an old receipt and tucked away in a journal, locked up in some cabinet or hidden under a mattress. The difference is that nobody shares them. But why don’t we? Why do we care so much what other people think? I’ve made a life of being a pleaser and it is bloody exhausting, people. So fuck it! I’m going to share a poem that I wrote when I was stoned in 2011.

I honestly don’t even remember being high in 2011 and couldn’t possibly think of why I would have been. But stoned I was and this, ladies and gentlemen, is my brain on drugs.

—

i’m going to take the next 5 minutes
because i am
quite high
to look at that organ called the heart
that sweet potato in your chest
mashed by love
and how it’s been beating to the beat of him mainly
and how you feel like when you walk down the street
and have no idea how you got home
because your mind was
elsewhere

it has been suggested
that i simply roll with it
and enjoy the sheer agony of love
the obsessing, the wondering, the worrying
the non stop one track thought, skipping
over and over

but the man makes his way
like a snake
slithering along the wrinkles and folds of my brain
back to the frontal lobe, the center stage
again
and i disappear
again