30 Poems in 30 Days: 11

So There

My shrink says I need to write more happy poems, stop writing all this shit, you know, because it gets into my brain, and takes up residence, becomes me, so I should "Write some lighter poems," she says, probably meaning that I should sit down here and write again about flowers, or sunshine, or trippy skips through the imaginary parks of life, or babies and puppies, and suddenly I want to leap out of my chair and quit, run out, because she doesn't get it, she has no idea what she's asking of me, suggesting that I become another Edward Lear or, God forbid, Shel Freaking Silverstein, clearly she knows nothing about art or the agonizing process of its inception, or the idea that some of us write to transform our suffering into something like light, only we need to dive into the darkness in order to do that, and furthermore I'm not paying her 165 bucks per "hour" to give me advice about poetry writing, which for a few years now I haven't really been doing, and even if it's black and dreary and smeared with shit symbolism the act of writing it makes me float, like my soul is getting bigger and dragging me upward, like I'm becoming the shadow and the light, so, I swear, if it takes sticking my tongue repeatedly into the socket of life's most painful wounds, if it takes eating my own heart in the middle of a desert while lightening strikes me in the head, I'm going to do it.  I just won't tell her about it.