the innocence grief interrupts

i want to write a poem about the feeling of trying to pull yourself together after grief. if you’ve experienced grief, you know the moment: when a spark lights a candle to brighten the darkness surrounding your heart— only for grief to blow it out before you can fully see again, reminding you it doesn’t work on your schedule.

grief has a habit of asking the same questions over and over and rarely providing the answers: 

why does healing feel like one step forward, ten steps back? why does grief rearrange what i’m trying so hard to organize? 

how am i supposed to rebuild when the pieces won’t stay still? 

i want to expand on these questions by sitting in the emotional tug-of-war between moving forward and being pulled back.  

i’m thinking of writing a poem where it keeps falling apart, both emotionally and on the page. maybe by words drifting across the page, coming close together, only to drift apart again.it might look something like this: after        what           seems                 like                     ages,                              you                         start                    to                    organize          your     broken     pieces and     prepare          to               fix                    yourself                         again,                              but                         grief                    puts               them          out     of            order before     you          can               finally                    put                                yourself                                                              together

i definitely want to play with the form a little bit and let the poem evolve into the best version of itself. visually, i may change it to where the first half of every line is neat and in form and the second half of every line drifts apart into disjointed chaos. structurally, i may make the piece shorter and punchier, with the spacing as the emotional landscape. voicelly (it’s a word in the tony dictionary haha), i may make the piece lean more toward gentle frustration, an innocence that is being taken away by experience. 

right now, it’s just a concept stamped with a few lines, more questions than answers. the metaphor is there, but i need to play around a lot with the emotional core. i need to allow the poem to find its full voice. i’m not sure what the final version will look like, but i love the direction that it is pulling me in and am intrigued by the shape it wants to take next.

the poem may still be scattered, but maybe that’s exactly where it’s supposed to be for now.