“Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You’ve got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you’ve got to burn away all the peripherals.” --Sylvia Plath

Words and feelings
Crowd my heart,
Fighting for release
Through my hands,
Through my fingers.
Sometimes they emerge
In beautiful forms,
Other times
They escape
As cluttered knots
Of misspent syllables.
The frustrations
Of being a poet:
Small in comparison
To the woes
That beset the world;
Immense
When the pressure to create
Overtax my ability
To express. 

c. 2008