I don't very much like being a human. The animal way of doing life always seemed better. I suppose I'll go back to it someday, after I'm old. So far, I haven't found anything to keep me. I wonder if I will, what that possibly might be.
Poetry is a way of coping with being human. Not to make sense of the world, the world already makes its own sense. It is to make things easier to bear. I mean this for everyone, but especially for a young animal like me. Language is a gorgeous sword, it can make shards of the world or carve it into understandable shapes. Poetry is to use it tenderly, with a good edge and slow thought.
This thinking thing, it can be like chasing a tail. Or wandering into a hall of mirrors. Endlessly entertaining, but then you lose yourself. Frightening and maddening too. You can lead yourself off into the air and then find that the stairs you built so quickly have come loose on the wind and how will you get down? It is hard to know the right way to think, how to stay tethered to your body-self, but not drown in it so much that the words don't surface.
Saying and hearing are even more confusing. You create a world to live in and then throw bits of it into other worlds, and you can only guess at how they are. You toss things out and a room is built around another person's head, but it never looks the same as when you built it. And it all has to happen so fast. No time for careful carpentry.
I talk in human terms because that is what my words know. Only in poetry can I say the animal things, sliding and humming beneath the surface, next to the brainstem dreams.
