Like a fisherman on the shore,
pulling out the deep sea like a
brush stroke, a long drag from
someone else’s cigarette, and
the pitter-patter of ink blots
on a worm-eaten pier. I am
self-diagnosing problems in
the name of poetry. If poetry
is, as old men put, the best
words in the best order, does
order here refer to sequence,
law, or command? Like a snake
charmer I am coaxing these
feelings out of their baskets,
letting them expose their
unentangled tangling bodies
to the midday sun, to the
curious eyes of onlookers.
They don’t know that it’s
a trick, until I say that
they don’t. Memory is
like that, too, always
true until you confront it.
Always there until you
need it. If our minds are
a sea of history, then you
have to imagine memory
as each and every scale
every leaf every strewn
piece of plastic every
sunken ship every
melting iceberg
every trench &
every death
in an endless
infinite
cruel
uncaring
seascape of love
and other accoutrements
I want to be greedy
pulling them up one by one
is not enough
I want to sail
out into the middle of the pacific ocean
and draw everything
onto my trawler
logistics be damned
logic be fucked
and I will toss
every single blackened scale
back into the water
and bring home with me
the shiniest discoveries
as shiny as anything born forgotten can ever be

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. The pieces are then uploaded without edits.