i have to

“ugh, you write everything.”

well of course i do.

my mind is a jumble of words

letters twisting into fragments and phrases

that bubble up from hidden wells in the wrinkles of gray matter,

churning and bumping into each other, and

when i try to speak them,

the words tumble out of my mouth,

rolling across my tongue and past my lips in a ball of partly strung together thoughts and hardly coherent ideas, bursting in the air,

spewing in a million different directions and

sliding down the walls

oozing goop slipping away from my fingers

off of your face

where i just spat the unfortunate mess.

you poor thing.

but when i write them,

when i allow the words to flow from the mess in my head down through my arm,

as the words straighten out by my shoulder blades

squeezing past my elbow

and are finally released through my fingers

sliding through the pen and gliding out in the ink

shaping the black liquid the way they intend to rest, that.

that’s when it becomes beautiful.

that’s when i can make sense of the emotional mess that’s in my heart

that gets garbled on the way to my brain and doesn’t sort itself out

until it reaches the pen.

somewhere along my collarbone,

the tiniest sparks are slid in between the letters, gluing them together,

joining words just the right way so that they lay straight on the paper,

their message loud and clear on the page.

they take instructions from my heart, but the message takes a while to find them.

that’s why i need my whole arm, not just my tiny tongue,

that gets twisted and tied as it tries to wrestle with my thoughts.

they are gentle, my thoughts, not wild,

and my tongue is too harsh

chopping them up instead of molding them.

squeezing them instead of shaping them.

i have to write, don’t you see?

i have to understand.

Sincerely, mad