how poetry is teaching me the importance of being honest

(this is new. as in 20-minutes-ago new. I don't have a title yet. It is also currently writing me, not the other way around, if you can understand at all what I mean by that. and there might be a lot of drafts. and there might be a lot of tearing apart (of me, not just of the poem, if you can understand what I mean by that, too) and this poem is why I love writing - because it makes me honest with myself, and that's not an easy place to go to most of the time, but it's probably a really important place to be)

There was a floating woman

on the median of highway 29.

A cardboard sign in her palms

proclaimed she was down

on her luck, cold, hungry,

have a happy holiday,

and she smiled like a banner,

or a flag from some abandoned

nation waving in black permanent

marker. and she levitated there,

wind beneath worn brown boots

while minivans passed her, a school

bus full of prying faces,

exhaust enthralled with the details

of her cheekbones,

covering the air around her

and carving deep into her lungs

in the center of the highway.

I passed the floating woman

with the heat on full blast,

some sweet singer-songwriter voice

spewing from my car speakers,

a latte resting in my left hand

and felt heavy, the way it feels

to be underwater when things

are never seen straight,

or where you’ll scream and

the sound is wrong, or weep

and it makes no difference,

already covered in water

and I was sick to my bones,

anger from pore to

muscle to spinal cord sifting

through me, relentlessly

coursing, relentlessly coursing

and rising and filling

until I could hardly stand

to live inside myself.

and she is sloshing around

behind my eyes,

that floating woman – a ghost.

When I drive on, I think of how

I love the clouds –

all shifts and shapes of them

through the sunroof,

and I could stare at them for hours

but then pick up the phone

with a clear voice.

and I love this world too much

to stop the car

and embrace her,

the waving flag of my humanity

that is floating on exhaust wind

in the center of the highway.

and I love my fears

too much to roll the window down,

to let my life seep from me to the median

where it wants to go,

or to scream to her

in the deepest guttural howl you can imagine

the thing she might never know:

that she is the poem that I'm writing.