I guess this serves as a warning.
To the friends and the loved ones
members of an active social order
wanting a life of something more than disorder.

Poetry is not a breath.
It is not an escape into a lesser abyss
that leaves you scratch free.
Or an opening and interesting guarantee.

Instead
it grabs inwardly at you.
It coaxes the trolls from the deepest
corners of the forest that you had
long since banished and left behind
and wanted to rid your mind of and
never wanted to see again.

The fire that had been stomped out
is reborn.

The crashing waves that broke the ship
fight again.

And poetry reopens the wounds
that you had hoped would heal
with time and with suppression
that had once filled and consumed with aggression.

Poetry is anger.

Poetry leaves the poet
drowning
in a river of currents when it flows
but out in the baking sun when
it stops.

The issue is
for a poet to be happy
with her work

she must also feel the
unhappy in her life.