A Poetic Appetite

This is hunger. This is the way my stomach turns itself inside out when I hear a phrase that makes my spine straighten like a lightning rod. I devour adversity consume the cadence of chaos, swallow their imagery whole As my hunger for poetic expression begins to grow but it's never enough. Never enough.. Because somewhere in the space between what I want to say and what spills onto the page, there's a chasm I'm always trying to bridge with nothing but breath and the desperate hope that this time, this time, the words will be enough. I've bled into notebooks, left fingerprints on keyboards, worn down pencils to their metal hearts, all for the chance to catch lightning in the mason jar of a single stanza. And when it comes— that moment when the poem writes itself, when my hand becomes a conduit for something larger than myself, when the words flow like water finding its inevitable path to the sea I am full. I am the hunger feeding itself. But it never lasts. The poem ends, the spell breaks, and I'm left with ink-stained fingers and an empty page that demands to be filled again. So I write. I write because writing Grafted to my skin. To express what lies within So you can say writing poetry Is in my DNA. I write because silence is a kind of death and words are the only resurrection I know. I write because somewhere in the marriage of sound and meaning, in the space between between the question and its answer, there lives a truth so beautiful, so necessary, that I would starve for the chance to speak it. This is passion. This is the fever that breaks only when the poem is born, crying and perfect and finally, finally alive.