Making a Texas Poet

The beginning was a lot of trauma, tbh, from being queer in a neighborhood where no one liked me in a house where my father's  anger & frustrations with himself made me think he didn't like me....but for that scoop, you've got to purchase my book of poetry, "Song From Its Bones" (*Unpublished* by all the big houses!).

The middle starts in a slightly-larger-than-my-hometown town, San Marcos, TX where I walked everyday in golden summer afternoons along a lively river that ran through my campus. High on the times, I made what has so far turned out to be a briliant decision to contractually debt myself for state funds so a wise, talented, beautiful black man could teach me how to read and write poetry. 

It feels good to write. I studied poetry because it seemed like the best way to get to write more, and it was, so I did. Writing poetry with such discipline led me to life-altering  self-growth and self-awareness.  I'd been a C student through High School who said and did and defended so many terrible, dumb, thoughtless stuff, so I wasn't exactly equipped to thrive in the big real world. poetry was how I learned to communicate what I was thinking and feeling. 

I Remember been deftly atune to my emotions my entire life. 

Poetry was a way of using words to catch the raw, vivivd emotions deep in my stomach and pass them into someone else so that they could feel exactly how I felt. Isn't that a wild notion when we think about how many people we encounter every day but can't figure out how they feel about something? Mostly boyfriends in my case. 

Today, my relationship with poetry is different. It is the cornerstone of my magical and wellness practice. I promise more on that soon, but I have to finish the Making of a Texas Poet story...

...The only part that didn't feel magical were the actual poetry workshops. I don't know what they're like now, but in 2007 they were 12 twenty-somethings in a room telling each other how cliche' or unappetizing or flat or sentimental our work was. I'm proud of how well I fended off those negative voices in those workshops and stood up for my work...but, like any trauma worth writing about, it wasn't until much later, when I tried to write and publish that I heard those voices again. My inner critics who got so deep inside me that I just didn't write anymore. 

The thing that made me feel so good. The skill I thought would keep me afloat. The focus of my terminal master's program. Just stopped like that. 

My critics would follow me from the time I finished Grad School until the end of my first significant live-in relationship seven years later.