The Poet's Secret
If writing was a sin, I’m Eve who fed Adam the banned fruit. If it was corrupted, then I’m Satan. If I had to surrender from the act of writing, I will repent at the right time: five minutes before my last breath.
I was always infatuated with words, always blown away by the miracle of building a world with them, by the ability of arranging letters together to form an elegant fabric of words.
My last lover left me with nothing but a tube of pain and a paste of words that endlessly seeped through the cracks of my half-alive heart. I loved and loved with aggressive blindness, a shove of uninvited veggies down a stubborn kid’s throat. I was left with the numbness of a single mother’s weary arms. The whole world cracked open on my shoulders like flying eggs. I’m the Ted Bundy of the hopeless romantics: I killed my heart in the name of love.
If you are reading this, I wanted from you what a poet wants from a poem. I wanted to love poetry and prose through you. I wanted to question you, write you, tear you apart and travel through your blood. I kiss my poems, I burn them sometimes, depends on how they make me feel.
It is indeed two in the morning as I write this, but I’m not complaining. I’m grateful for my insomnia. The night made me a writer. The pain that soaks up my pillows every night made me a warrior. I write in the dead of night when silence engulfs me and tightens its grip around my throat. The writing process is indeed painful, but I pour because I want to. I pour because I have to. Under the moon, I howl like a wolf. Loud half-cracked howls like a wolf in agony. A wolf that has lost its pack. I’m a wolf nevertheless.
Writing is not a smooth line or the alphabetical order that is ritualized in kindergarten, nor is it something that you can master overnight. It is a pilgrimage, it is musical pieces. Writing is a refuge. As much as I enjoy it with every fiber of my being, I need it like a baby needs its mother.
I had always written aimlessly, but it was only last year that I decided to produce and eventually publish a book titled Arms Like Knives, a collection of poetry that most resembles my journey through life. Its context revolves around astronomy, astrology and Greek gods. Every chapter is a planet, from Mercury to Planet Nine, which speaks of its own purpose and represents a single emotion or idea.
In it, I explore the ideas of love and what accompanies it from enchantment to grief and loss. There are also a couple of pieces about leading a double life and how merciless it really gets. I would imagine that half of the people in my generation that live in this region would relate to them.
I aspire, as a writer, to take your pain and put it on paper. But mostly, I spill my own pain like coffee on blank pages. I know what it is like to be with someone whom your heart doesn’t move for just as I know what it is like to be helplessly head over heels in love, and what it is like for the person to walk away long before the love has worn out.
Over the months when I had no one and no drugs to clean my lungs with, I had to find another retreat, another medicine. There is no paracetamol for a broken heart, but I desperately had to relieve myself of her. There is no act of cleaning like writing. Scrubbing my arteries with words. Hanging my heart over lines of poetry. Coughing up verses of her abandonment.
I may have written my first book, but I will not stop writing for as long as I breathe.
Luna is an Emirati writer and a Psychology major. She spends her time reading, writing and sketching. She writes dominantly in English, but also writes in Arabic. She has a passion for language and literature. After working on her her book for over a year, Arms Like Knives was published May 11, 2018. You can find her on Twitter and Goodreads.