Becoming a Poet (or How She Did It)

She opened a new document, then chose to set up wide margins around several random words, some of them quiet, others noisy, even shrill. Then all she had to do was write enough to fill the entire space until she had a square, or rectangle, an attractive box of neatly printed words.

Then she got serious about it and put up little pieces of paper with phrases she had thought of all around the room where she worked at her computer. They were on those stickies (yellow, blue, pink) and she would consult the paper words and use them (cautiously, sparingly) in her poetry.

Then she decided that what she wrote wasn’t good enough after all and she quit. Just like that. Although she still imagined herself a poet and kept on building her collection of paper slips. Sometimes the glue failed, and the paper words drifted in the air all around her, falling on her head.

The light words bounced and fluttered in the air and came to rest in all kinds of places. She let them lay where they had fallen without saying a word. The heavy words left their mark, and she bore the scars (which she proudly displayed) of her chosen, but soon abandoned, profession.

She thought she could never write prose, telling a story, having to make sense, nor did she think she needed to justify her work or her words, but she did it anyway.