POETIC MEMOIRS

I am sitting at Panera Bread right now with my laptop and a stack of papers so high that Wilt Chamberlain would stand on his tippy-toes just to see over them. Something powerful happened to me today, and I don't know where it came from. I have been lamenting my dry spell lately. Everyone says that you need to be sad in order to write. Well, I am not so sure that I would agree with that. You see I grabbed my stack of papers that are filled with ideas on napkins and the openings to poems and just older poems that I just seemed to have forgotten that I ever wrote. Well, some of those poems were from the "sad days." Boy, did I have a few of those. I don't know if maybe I wasn't great at expressing myself, but I was just appalled by those poems. If they were written by somebody else, I probably would have told the poet to "get over it." Hahahaha, but alas, they were me. So, "Jared, get over it!" Nope, instead my motivational force isn't sadness, it is motivation. Whenever I feel like I can take over the world I start getting ideas that I jot down.

You know, when I got back from the gym today I just thought that I would lay on the bed and maybe read. Then I said, you know what I am going to organize my book of work, and then I remembered I had a free smoothie on my Panera card (yes, I have one, don't judge). I came right on up here to the great Panera Bread and sat down and all of a sudden facebook wasn't calling me (for once) what was calling me was my stack of papers. My pages that reminded me of my past, and where I was at a certain point in my life.....these poems are my memoirs. These poems and these ideas have dates attached. I never thought until today that these writings are the history of my life. They show me that I am human, I have written some horrible shit, and I have written some amazing stuff.

I may not be the best, or the most forward thinking individual who ever lived, but I have something to say (and apparently judging from the folder of ideas, a lot that I have left to say that I never bothered to say.) I am someone powerful, and I can be proud of all that I am, and all that I am going to become...whatever that may be.

Maybe the point I am trying to make isn't what I care about. I spend so much time trying to make a point to other people that I stop and I go, "You know what I write for me. I write to make the point to myself." That is who I am. I talk out loud so that I can make sense of what is in my brain. And when my voice is gone, I write to make sense of my brain.

Yes, my dear friend is right in what he once said...."Poetry (or in any writing) isn't to make sense to the reader, is for me to make sense of myself."