They Told Me To Write

Poem by Alice Y Hull

They told me to write, that’s what they said.

They told me to write down the things in my head.

So I fondled lightly with feathered thoughts,

That felt their way through ferocious woes.

Too prudent to put pen to paper

Those precious pieces of mental prose.

But how am I to be my saviour

While I hold a tainted pen?

Musings mirroring my behaviour

Is it them helping me or me helping them?

Or is my helping them helping me help me more?

If healing from a sickly surgeon

Does the sufferer suffering suffer more?

To know the beast of your eternal burden

Is cloistered inside your mental shell

How can the verse of an unlearned wordsman

Write the freedom from your internal hell?

How can these words that fill the page

With lines that twist and turn and change

Be the keys to a capricious cage

That holds your sorrow, your love, your rage.

Now I watch my words as they wander,

Writhing right before my eyes

And realise

There are some things my words can’t disguise

By covering my tracks with fancy syntax

Look! No author dwells here!

No poet utters these similes of fear!

The beginnings long forgotten

And I can’t spell the end,

I merely sit, in the middle, with you and this pen.

I’m losing the thread now, can’t see the ties,

Lost the connection between my mind and the lines

But they TOLD me to do it! That’s what THEY said!

THEY wanted to know these things in my head.

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