The Masochism Of Longing

I am a writer who found language before I found myself. I have spent most of my time since trying to close that gap. I write from the uncomfortable places. The ones that don't resolve neatly, that sit in the chest too long, that most people feel but few say out loud. Lament, grief, the quiet violence of loving someone more than they deserve: these are the territories I keep returning to, not because I enjoy the suffering but because I think honesty about it matters. My work tends to live at the intersection of the personal and the philosophical. I am drawn to the paradox i.e. the bliss inside the weeping, the familiarity that stops breeding contempt, the fire that follows the ice. I believe a poem should leave a bruise, not a lesson. I write in lowercase because vulnerability doesn't announce itself. I write in fragments because that's how feeling actually arrives and not in complete sentences, but in flashes, in images, in the one line you can't stop hearing. I am not a poet who has it figured out. I am a poet who keeps looking. And for now, that feels like enough.