How Poetry Brought My Soul Back From the Dead

As the Words Poured Out of Me, So Did the Darkness

Maybe my soul wasn’t dead. Maybe it wasn’t that dark in there. But it feels like it was. Because it was holding so many words. So many feelings. It was overburdened with personal history and self-censorship. Until I let go. And let the words out and brought my soul back from the dead.

“When truth has no burning, then it is philosophy, when it gets burning from the heart, it becomes poetry.” — Muhammad Iqbal

Only a poet knows how it feels when the words are humming in a rhythmic cadence. The line breaks make themselves. Capitals call out when necessary. And words form sentences, but not always in the traditional fashion. The mind assembles on the fly and random letters turn into poetic verse. And there you sit. In awe of what you’ve just done.

But it’s not always like that. It would be really, really nice if it was. But no, the words don’t always come. They don’t always make sense. They sometimes fight us with all their might. They hide from us so the only words we have are the obvious ones. And that’s not poetry.

Sometimes we wait. For the words. For the muse. For the direction. For the subtle hint that it’s ok to proceed. To put one word after the other until it becomes something. Poetry is a puzzle. But one without corner pieces to guide us.

I wasn’t always writing from the heart during my first run on Medium. Sometimes, I was, but at other times I was just writing into the techno-void. And even the stories I was telling didn’t feel like poetry does to me now. At the time, I wrote a couple of poems, but I didn’t feel them like I do now. They fell flat. They were flat. My soul was flat.

But when I came back, I decided I was going to be different. I was going to write differently. I was a different person than I was before, but I needed something to help me expose that. It was poetry. Poetry held me open in a way that I hadn’t been since college.

In college, I took a poetry class in my junior year. I loved it. I was actually kind of obsessed with it. (I still have all of the poems somewhere.) And I wasn’t bad at it. I wrote about the recent death of my mother and was shocked that I had no problem reading it in class even though I couldn’t tell any of my friends that she had died the past summer. My soul was opened, briefly.

But when the class ended, so did my sojourn into poetry. And without it, my soul started its slow matriculation into darkness.

Words pour from me Like a fountain Unwilling to face a drought and unphased by the darkness

The first few poems I published when I came back here weren’t very good. I had been writing them in a journal and they were a mish-mash of thoughts, realizations, and questions. But the act of letting them breathe and seek solace in the ether was a gift. To myself.

Once they took air, so did I. And the words came. And they haven’t stopped. I am not a traditional poet. I can sit down at the computer and write a poem in ten minutes and be happy with it. And I think it’s because of the freedom poetry is giving me.

Poetry is a release of the soul. It allows me to turn my insides out and expose them. And when I do, I realize they aren’t full of darkness anymore. My insides are beautiful. And full of words. And thoughts. And hope.

“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” — William Wordsworth

People told me that I seemed dead inside before. More than once. Maybe it was my introversion. Maybe it was where I fall on the spectrum. Or maybe my soul was a little bit dead. Maybe they were right.

But if they could read my words now, the darkness in them and the light, I wonder what they would think. Because I think that poetry brought my soul back from the dead. And now I am alive again. And I will not allow the words to stop. They nourish me. I hope your words nourish you as well.

Nourish me and give me life Propel me forward so I can’t look back And allow me this moment in time

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One more thing

If you haven’t read this story by Ansel Guarneros, read it. It encapsulates what a poetry community is and how poetry binds us to one another.