I am death's mourner

Cosette is dying. If death should so choose to spare her, with all of my watering efforts . . . then, I shall think twice before again applying a name, and a gender, to my houseplants.

When I was between the ages of 10 and 12 I bred gerbils. It began as a money-making endeavor with my two best friends. Pooling our own meager resources, we acquired a female gerbil named Scratchy, a male named Midnight, a cage (from Sierra's garage) with a pretty torn-up lid, a water bottle, food, and cedar-chip bedding. The scent of all this combined will forever bring back countless memories whenever I walk through pet stores.

Somehow, despite my owning a cat, I was designated as the keeper of the gerbils. It was supposed to be a money-making endeavor because we knew enough about the birds and the bees to assume that if we put a male and female in the same cage, eventually there would come babies, which the pet store would then be willing to purchase for about $3 each. Laura and Sierra had both lost interest before Scratchy became pregnant for the first time. I will never forget the feel of her growing belly in my tiny hands. Yes, I am now jaded enough to know that these precious baby gerbils were re-purchased for snake food. But also I was so shaped by this experience that this thought is not as traumatizing as you may imagine.

This eco-system in my bedroom taught me more about the "jungle out there" or the "dog-eat-dog world" than any textbook ever could. When gerbils died, the others ate them. When the smallest members of a litter could not fight the crowd for food or water . . . too bad. There was no such thing as incest either, and when male children grew to a certain size, they could no longer be kept in the same cage as their father, if there were other females as well. Each time I tried to force this eco-system to be slightly more fit to my human interpretation of how the world should be, I was thwarted miserably, coming eventually to learn that they were animals . . . and, that I was as well. Each of those gerbils had a name - and a personality. Every single one was different! I remember standing in front of their cages and marveling that they were so small, so different from me, and yet that I could learn so much about individualism, and nature, from them.

And now you're wondering about writing! Well, I am a poet. I am certainly not claiming to be a spectacular one! But if any of you have read a small children's book about Frederick the mouse, that explains my identification quite well. I can be death's mourner - for gerbils, or houseplants, or stolen bikes - so feelingly that words come out unrestrained onto paper and that, whether it turns out to be intelligible to anyone else or not, is how I define poetry. Luckily I'm not only a morbid poet. The incredible wonders and joys of this life and world tear poetry from my core as well. I believe I identify as "a poet" because I generally can't help what I write. I don't tend to draft. I tend to think, and when thoughts roll around enough in a certain way, I grab madly all around me for paper or word processor and, out the words come. I want feedback here because we are all writing such different genres, that it will be fascinating to see what everyone's interpretations will be. When I do edit, or "help" what I write, I only am that much more in love with what it was that spilled unrestrained onto my paper. That helping process, is what actually feels creative to me, and that is what I am looking forward to cultivating.