After months and months of motion and emotion, sudden not-feeling stifles creativity; it doesn't incite the rabble within me. Despite constantly being in spaces where I should have felt something, I am inwardly dormant. No one vibrates at the heart of this flesh and bone girl.

True, I woke up angry, two mornings ago, but I forgot it/the anger, the dream that incited the anger/and left it unrecorded. I didn't care to remember.

I DON'T LIKE THIS

Memory fails to conjure up fictions/truths/puzzles whose subtleties and contradictions I sort out by writing. Memory only lists/it lists where I've gone and what I've done, but not the vitality of those places and actions. Memory fails because I don't feel anything/there is no point of departure/no needle-prick/pricked, I wonder Why am I angry, sad or melancholy? Why am I afraid?

Something always, something seemingly rooted, has been suddenly questioned or stolen or simply lost/find it!

Disrupted within, I write. I must. I tremble because of an emotion I can't control/unless I write/project its urgency/the urgency that forces me to shake epileptic/the mob within me clamors for release, justice, peace/this emotion that incites a riot, a love poem, a mourning within me. Emotion compels me to endanger myself with a truth, a fiction/no one is safe/there are no happy endings/write stories of survival/this is a wary and crucial beginning.

//

Maybe I shouldn't feel anything right now. If I felt all the time the way I do, I would exhaust myself . . . Or worse, reduce writing into a duty, a compulsive disorder, diseased sentences; conscious yet uncritical, it would atrophy into a unhealthy body of fiction mewling ailment and not much else.

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