Poetry
Some things are better approached sideways.
Most of these poems circle the same territory explored elsewhere in The Semantic Mind: SDAM, trauma, identity, memory, gender, childhood, love, loss, and the strange accommodations a person makes in order to live.
But poetry is not another way of writing the papers.
The papers investigate. The poems experience.
Some were written before Jessica understood what SDAM was. Some before she understood the role trauma had played in her life. Others came later, after she had acquired language for things she had been trying to describe for decades.
Taken together, they leave another kind of record.
Not necessarily of what happened.
Of what it was like to be Jessica while she was trying to understand it.
The poems below are arranged alphabetically. There is no recommended reading order. Start anywhere.
AFTER THE FALL OF TROY
~1 minute read · Poetry · Survival · Adaptation · Surrender
What kind of strength remains when winning is no longer possible?
Troy has fallen. The warrior’s strength can no longer save anything. This poem turns instead toward the strength of the conquered—the terrible capacity to yield, change, endure, and remain alive when the world refuses to yield first.
BULLET PROOF
~1 minute read · Poetry · Trauma · Protection · Vulnerability
What must you give up to become impossible to hurt?
Protection can become its own injury. Bullet Proof looks at the bargain made when survival requires hardening the places where desire, attachment, and vulnerability once lived.
COME DEATH — SWEET DEATH
~1 minute read · Poetry · Death · Desire · Surrender
What if Death arrives not as an enemy, but as the lover who has kept you waiting?
Death becomes courtship: intimate, seductive, and strangely tender. The language of romantic surrender is turned toward the one suitor nobody ultimately refuses.
COME TO ME, SWEET MISERY
~1 minute read · Poetry · Sorrow · Desire · Familiarity
Can misery become so familiar that we begin to welcome it home?
The poem gives suffering the language of intimacy. What should be rejected instead becomes recognizable, dependable, almost beloved—the old companion who always knows the way back.
COMPLEX PTSD
~1 minute read · Poetry · Trauma · Identity · Survival
What remains after the danger ends but the adaptations do not?
A compressed portrait of trauma as aftermath rather than event: the world changes, yet the structures built to survive it continue doing their work.
DEADBORN
~1 minute read · Poetry · Identity · Loss · Possibility
Can you grieve a life that never had the opportunity to begin?
Not every loss follows possession. Some lives are lost as possibilities—selves, futures, childhoods, and ways of being that existed only as roads never taken.
FOUNDLING
~1 minute read · Poetry · Belonging · Childhood · Otherness
What if the people who should be yours never quite seem to be your people?
The foundling becomes more than an abandoned child. She is anyone who arrives in the world carrying the persistent suspicion that some mistake has been made about where—and among whom—she belongs.
HALF-LIFE
~1 minute read · Poetry · Childhood · Trauma · Survival
Where is the grace in granting us gifts only to curse us in equal measure?
Some children land in sunlight. Others germinate in shadow and grow toward whatever light they can find. The poem refuses the comforting demand that suffering should be received gratefully merely because the sufferer survived it.
HOUR BY HOUR
~1 minute read · Poetry · Time · Endurance · Mortality
Sometimes a life is too large to survive all at once.
Reduce it. A year becomes a day; a day becomes an hour. The poem finds endurance not in conquering an unbearable future, but in refusing to carry more of it than the present demands.
I AM NOT SETTLING
~2 minute read · Poetry · Worth · Love · Self-Denial
It is understanding that this is meant for me—and this is meant for others.
A lifetime of deprivation can masquerade as good judgment. The poem examines the quiet machinery by which wanting less, accepting less, and expecting less can cease to feel like surrender and begin to feel like knowing one’s proper station.
LIFE NOT LIVED
~1 minute read · Poetry · Loss · Time · Possibility
How do you mourn what never happened?
There are losses without memories: the childhood not inhabited, the youth not experienced, the possible selves that never became actual. This poem gives absence something close to a biography.
NATURE BOY
~1 minute read · Poetry · Identity · Nature · Difference
What if the strange child was never meant to become ordinary?
The outsider is reconsidered not as an unfinished normal person but as something with its own nature. Difference ceases to be merely a defect awaiting correction.
NOT A DREAM, A THOUGHT
~1 minute read · Poetry · Mind · Imagination · Reality
Where exactly does a thought live when it has no picture?
Dream, image, memory, and thought are easily conflated when language assumes everyone experiences them alike. This poem inhabits the less visible territory of a mind whose thoughts need not become pictures to become real.
OFT I THINK
~1 minute read · Poetry · Reflection · Memory · Self
What does looking backward mean when the past cannot be revisited?
Reflection normally suggests returning somewhere. Here, thought must work with what remains after experience itself has disappeared.
PEARLS
~1 minute read · Poetry · Pain · Beauty · Transformation
The pearl is beautiful. The oyster might have another opinion.
Beauty can be the artifact left by injury. Pearls looks at the uneasy temptation to admire what suffering produced without thereby declaring the suffering worthwhile.
PROTOTYPE
~1 minute read · Poetry · Evolution · Difference · Time
What if you are an answer to a question the world has not asked yet?
Evolution builds prototypes without knowing the future. Some fit their moment; others do not. The poem reframes being out of place in time as mismatch rather than tragedy: perhaps the organism was never wrong—only early.
SENTENCE FIRST—VERDICT AFTERWARDS
~1 minute read · Poetry · Judgment · Justice · Identity
What happens when judgment arrives before the evidence?
Borrowing the Queen of Hearts’ wonderfully backwards jurisprudence, the poem examines a world in which the conclusion comes first and everything afterward is recruited to justify it.
Sentence First — Verdict Afterword
SEVERELY DEFICIENT
~2 minute read · Poetry · SDAM · Memory · Mortality
What becomes of a life when the footsteps disappear as quickly as they are made?
Most people can glance backward and find a beach marked by their passage. Here the sand is unmarred. The poem considers memory without pretending its absence is either purely tragedy or secret blessing: the moment is lived, dies, and gives way to the next.
THE CALL
~1 minute read · Poetry · Purpose · Destiny · Desire
What happens when something inside you keeps calling and refuses to explain why?
Some imperatives arrive before their explanations. The poem listens to the pull toward a destination the conscious mind may neither understand nor have chosen.
THE UNSHAKABLE CURSE
~1 minute read · Poetry · Gift · Curse · Fate
A perfect curse does not merely deny you the gift. It lets you see exactly what the gift could have done.
Capacity and obstruction arrive together. The tragedy lies not simply in being prevented, but in possessing enough vision to understand the dimensions of what has been prevented.
WEDDING VOWS
~1 minute read · Poetry · Love · Commitment · Marriage
What exactly are we promising when we promise forever?
The ritual language of marriage makes impossible claims sound ordinary. The poem looks beneath the ceremony at commitment, time, change, and the audacity required to make a promise to a future neither person can know.