Letters of the condemned. Last words scratched on a cell’s wall. To write like that.
The way a source strains toward the light, toward the air. Its laboring work, its effort, its black passageways like despair. That’s the way a poet looks for words. With muscles, gestures.
Even a painful longing is some form of presence.
Where your pain is, there your heart lies also.
We cling to words like drowning men to straws. But still we drown, we drown.
I don’t write poetry when I wish, I write when I can’t, when my larynx is flooded and my throat is shut.