Why I Write

I write because I am not skilled at drawing.

For me, writing is my form of painting: the paintbrush, now a pen, dips into swirling colours of deep provocative thoughts, waxy metaphors, honey-sweetened syllables and an array of vivid, vibrant, exotic words that I otherwise could not justify on my tongue. I love art; love the way finite movements compose the most detailed, descriptive drawings of real life, or fantasy. Writing for me is the drawing I could never do: each word is strung up on a sentence washing line, wrangled by the wind and compressed by the sun, until each one melds together like that of graphite on paper. I write because my drawings are too bad to truly express what I am and that around me.

I write because I love to explore.

Well, I actual dislike exploring. Maybe not dislike so much, but have an intense fear that something may go wrong. And yet, my backpack continues to fill with the new artefacts I excavate while I traverse the land and sky and heaven and sea on a wispy cloud of words. I love to collect concoctions of phrases and explosive potions of expressions: fumbling and thumbing through syllables that stain like paint powder on the page: a colour run of ideas that dazzle under their newness. I write because these newborn words make me excited, make me feel something big.

I write to understand.

Sometimes I feel like my brain is too small, and other times too big, and only echoes one thought around and around and around and around. It’s a colour explosion but this time the fireworks ricochet through my body, tugging at any flesh that stands and coats it all with inescapable, putrid tar, claustrophobic and uncomfortable: I want to escape myself because I am stuck with myself. The words that fly across violin strings onto paper give an articulation to the squiggles that coil and knot around my brain like too many silken strings for one marionette. I write because I am blinded by hot bursts of feelings that span from foreign compositions to plain English, capitalised and furious. I write because my emotional energy is too much, too plain, too strong to merely wrap up in newspaper and read some other time in some other life.

I write because I love to feel and explore and because I am bad at drawing.

Kaleidoscope Jar (My Favourite Things) POEM

Someone, a long time ago, gifted me a jar,

whose glass could not be pierced or shattered,

and a rim that could expand indefinitely

to fit all of my most treasured things in:

The sweetened scent of vanilla from its cocoon

that curls from a candle in a closed room;

the barely audible crackles from its wick

reminiscent of early evenings in winter

The soft, safe smudge just above a cat’s paw pad

and nestled behind little pink toes, like beans;

that delicious velvet space uncoiling in the sun

- whose golden wrath dusts along exposed collarbones

Those minute moments in old film photography,

where hazy colours pop black patches fragmentally,

And everyone captured extends their carefree grins

knowing these memories will not be rose-tinted

Deep brown pinstripes that embalm griddled Greek cheese

- singing alongside charring vegetables -

Like Mediterranean ventures in the summers’ peak

Where any corner turned would present a postcard scene

That warm sensation, like pouring brewed tea into you blood;

inescapable jitters that come with this caffeine rush

when your eyes lay upon the harmonious freckles

that patter upon the cheeks of the person that you love

Someone, a long time ago, gifted me a jar,

which cradles all of my most treasured things

And when, sometimes, the sky is washed with grey

I open the jar to allow a kaleidoscope to escape.