When I stopped writing Poetry

When I stopped writing poetry, the words became something else.
They became daggers, and swords. They began to weigh…
They began to gain weight, and slump around.
Each a leaden weapon, blunt objects.

To crack skulls and break bones.

I never saw it as a conscious decision, but I felt it. Everything started to fall into place, where before there were not any places. All the words began to crystallize, to form structures. And all the edges: angular and sharp; knives to be thrown in the darkness, never missing their mark.

But one thing that wasn’t there for sure — silence.

The words proliferated, expanded: Cicadas emerging from their slumber, to ring out on drying trees dying, while marking the atmosphere with calculated screams.

They were not words of sorrow, or of joy. Instead, implosive and explosive. Nothing in between. Not sweet, not fluid. Instead, cubes falling down crags in unbearable summers.

Did I ever write poetry? Was it ever really poetry at all?

And The Everything became a question; Everything became a mirror where sentences lived with their tags out in front of them, and they walked backwards in their inside-out pants.

2019.05.24