A Poem for Me is Not a Poem for You

Content Warning: About 4 paragraphs in, I mention my struggle with self-harm, and I also include an excerpt from one of my poems that refers to scars and blood.

A poem for me is not the same as a poem for my mom. When I write for her, a lot of the truth gets lost in eraser shavings scattered across my apartment floor. The real message gets lost amidst the ash that fell off my joint when I was scratching out the word “drowning” so I could replace it with “dreaming”.

A few weeks ago, my sister asked me to write her a poem about roly-polys and the good times we used to have picking up rocks and looking for them; I called it “Fish out of Water”. When I mailed it to my mom, she called me a week later to tell me about a nightmare she had where my sister and I were infants and she watched us drown. She told me that one of the night-guards had to wake her up, because she was thrashing around so much, they thought she was going to throw herself off the top bunk. She laughs about this on the phone while I take a mental note to be more careful with my word choice next time.

I rewrote the poem for my blog, which I find myself doing often, because the work I write for other people doesn’t feel the same as what I write at three in the morning when the voices in my head scream poetry at me until I write it down. My happier poems sound like they have a completely different author—both of which experienced trauma, but one is better at hiding it than the other. After sending it to my mom and sister, a couple stanzas needed to be added to tell my truth:

I don’t have to worry about her seeing this version of my poem.

She doesn’t follow my blog—where my poems take on a darker hue.

I lace them with truth and it crawls out of the lines like a handful of roly-polies

sneaking through the cracks of my fingers.

I draw blood from my scars to fill up the stanzas.

Revision is key, and happiness is too hard to swallow.

A poem for me is a confession. A cry for acknowledgement that I’m not alone with these feelings. I want someone to read my work and feel relieved that they don’t experience these demons alone. I would rather be known as the girl who always writes about her struggles with self harm than be the one only writing what makes other people feel comfortable. My intent isn’t to glamourize my struggles with mental health, but to embody them into my art the way they are fully assimilated in my personality.

My sister asked for that poem to make her happy, because she had a stressful week, but she will never know how taxing it was to siphon the pain from each stanza. When I workshopped the piece last semester, my classmates wanted tension between my sister and I earlier in the poem. It doesn’t work without the tension, because in reality, we know it was there. To take that out of the piece is to hinder the message; that diamonds grow under extreme pressure. There will always be a reason to choose pain, but it wont define you forever:

The little sister was always tiny; dad could bounce her on his knee all day long.

The older one had “fat” burned into her brain with a red-hot

branding iron by the babysitter in third grade,

so she never looked at her little sister the same.

Dad’s lap turned into dad’s wallet with age.

I want to show him I didn’t need the help.

A poem for me expresses parts of my story I leave out of the essays. I find it easier to use vibrant figurative language to express my inner thoughts than a carefully curated dissertation about privately owned jails and their treatment towards inmates like my mother. My poetry paints my sorrow in pastels on the paper, and invites others to gaze at its beautiful deception.

I have no problem laying my guts out on the table in my writing, because I know the people that would be most affected by my work don’t read it. I can be as honest as I want about how my dad has failed to rekindle our relationship numerous times, and how my step-mom doesn’t care for me because I’m outspoken and act too much like my real mom—I know they couldn’t care less about my writing; about my blog. I can publish thousands of depressing poems because I know my mom will only see the ones that make it into F Block at Albemarle District Jail. If she read the real me, I know she would be worse off in there—mentally—so I carefully piece together a melodic rhyme scheme for my mom to show off.

“Everyone in here always talks about what a great writer you are!” she boasts weekly, “You really need to send me more of your work.”

I wish I could. I want to show her the kind of writer I truly am. A poem for me is not the same as a poem for my mom, and it’s probably better that way.