There's a reason I'm predominantly a prose writer. I have an enormous respect for the art of poetry, and my admiration of it often seeps into my prose: alliteration, wordplay, rhymes just sparse enough to feasibly pass as unintentional, lyrical, rhythmic phrases that bounce or glide or frolic. But poetry itself is something I've never really been able to replicate. It isn't that I don't understand how; on a purely technical level, I manage just fine. It's just that something about it never feels quite right to me, in the way that an illustrator who exclusively makes cozy picture books would feel out of their depth if you suddenly asked them to write a spy thriller. I balk, for instance, at the rigidity of formal verse. Free verse feels more welcoming; but the meaning always drowns in images that I'm too afraid to clarify, lest the poem be anything less than spontaneous*. Besides, any jackass can just ignore all the rules and say they did something. It takes a skilled jackass to ignore all the rules, say they did something, and actually be right.
"Untitled" is about feeling out of place. It doesn't really matter where. I couldn't pick just one source for it, so I don't expect you to, either. But it's not about the pain of exclusion so much as it is about the decisiveness of having had enough. I sought to represent the pride and the joy of finding people who value what you have to say, no matter how different you may be from them— or becoming that person yourself, if it comes down to it.
*Nevermind that, as far as I can tell, poems go through revision in much the same way as prose. If it doesn't spawn fully-formed and perfect in one go, like Athena from the head of Zeus, clearly I'm Doing It Wrong.
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