Do not backtrack. Do not delete.

You should have come here with no expectations, like the way you were born.

Or perhaps, there were already expectations threaded in your baby blue.

You want to be something great, an absolute phenom, but the work to get there is beyond your comprehension.

We’re not talking a closet makeover, we’re talking a top-down restructuring, tossing everything old out, burning your juvenilia unless you’re willing to say that 20 years from now someone will still care enough to read poetry.

Almost every night it’s like noting has taken on its own relevance in my life – to journal is an act of memory, to write is an act of memory, but to forget is an act of memory too.

I remember in a class about the laws governing airplanes, those great free iron birds, that countries practice their sovereignty by giving it away.

In a sense, that’s my relationship with vulnerability. With honesty. With truth.

I let people in. I don’t ask them to take off their shoes, because I know we come from different cultures. I let them sit on my couch, no matter how dusty and smoke-riddled they were, because I’m a good host. A good ghost. I let them into my bedroom and throw all my books out because I love a second opinion.

Who doesn’t? Why else would I be posting these half-sane scrambled doodle scribble onto the Internet? For fame? Pish no, for people to read me and possibly one day psychoanalyse me.

Marietta is playing in the background as I want to take a mental breather. This is an enunciation of the process. This is the hidden page, the centerfold of an IKEA manual on how to build a poem.

Jericho Brown said he wrote at 230 am in his underwear, chanting up and down the halls of his house. I only wish I were that grand.

Freewriting Explanation: Every day, Valen shall use 5 minutes to write completely unprompted and uninterrupted, letting the words lead the way. There is no end purpose to each piece, but rather, the pieces are allowed to develop naturally in their own way.