I was eating rice. Just a few mouthfuls down and a word or two came to mind, from which a poem could be born.
I wondered, what should I do now? Leave my meal and get up? Or wash my hands and jot down those words somewhere with my mouth still full? Or turn on my phone's recorder and leave them there? Or deposit those words with someone sitting across from me? Or keep humming this poem's embryo in my head...in tune and out of tune...until the meal was done?
I did none of these things, or couldn't do them. I thought, who cares about my poetry anyway? I thought, what if someone bursts out laughing at such fuss over a "mere" poem? I thought...no, I truly can't remember what exactly I thought. Perhaps this is how all unwritten poems naturally die— cradle and grave in the same place.
This way many of my poems have died stillborn. They've all been lost... just like that girl I lost even as I held her gaze; just like that place I kept meaning to visit but never did, lost to forgetfulness; just like that moment I kept trying to live but never managed to, even now.
What I've written in notebooks, what I've written in my head, what I've given birth to, what I've failed to birth...in busyness or in laziness— I live with all of it.