Untitled – First Chord (notes).

To read the poem, rather than the notes on the poem, click here.

So, for reasons that would take more time to explain than they deserve and are irrelevant to this blog entirely, last night, I ended up at a journal I started almost seven years ago now, in the days following my release from the hospital. I was a total mess at the time (perhaps unsurprisingly), completely wrecked over what I had lost, and finding my grief further complicated by (something close to) everyone’s inability to understand it. I stand by that loss as one of my first major grief experiences, one that literally left me ill, (the month afterward, which also included my roommate’s death at the hands of her eating disorder, was when I first began to experience debilitating migraines), and which — because many people didn’t understand and many who might have were not yet aware I’d been discharged (chalk it up to denial, but it took me ages to tell people I was “home”), I largely experienced alone. I did, however, write… as I am wont to do when I’m at a loss for other ways to communicate my experience, and so I have countless, rambling journal entries about the experience.

This poem, which I have yet to come up with a title for, is taken almost entirely from a couple of those rambling journal entries. It pieces several phrases from the opening entries of my post-Rogers journal. In fact, I think the only lines not in the original writing are “bouncing constantly against the boundaries of my brain” and “as I tense to hold them in, the memory of them I’m meant to forget.” Literally, everything else is self-on-self plagiarizing. Honestly, this idea of how to approach the Rogers (or in this case, post-Rogers) series has been with me for some time, but I’ve avoided it for various reasons, including the fact that I tend to get sucked into the old journals and not write based on what I’m reading, and perhaps more to the point, I find them painful to read. The fact that I barely wrote a word at Rogers (following my first days there) also complicates the viability of this option. Still, I like the way it’s starting to work out in this piece… for two main reasons: I like the immediacy of the poem. I’m not sure this particular experience (the whole of it, including the illness, the hospitalization, and the grief afterward) is one I could safely write about present tense, and the journals give me that feel, without forcing me to relive things in the way I’d have to, were I to try and design new, present-tense words. I also have a (strange) respect for the fact that these are (largely) the exact words I used at the time. The conversation series I spoke of attempting between my sixteen-year-old and current selvese seems stalled, largely because me-now has no idea what to say to me-then. Perhaps, the sixteen-year-old-me will file further complaints in the future, but for now, the twenty-three-year-old-me doesn’t seem to have much response for them. I suppose, in a way, working with the journals serves as a collaboration between the two. It gives the immediate voice of that experience/ that age a vehicle of its own, but in a way that seems less messy (and less potentially dangerous) to me than just handing the journals over for review.  I’d be curious to see what else I can do with journal entries, if I have the stamina to look through some more of them.