Why I Write in the Dark

I am a poet. I write what I cannot say. In the evenings, when the house was quiet, I wrote. Not to be read — not at first — but to survive the feeling. A poem is the place where the unsayable finds a door. People ask why poetry, as though it were a hobby. It is not. It is the discipline of paying attention when attention costs you something. To write *Kisses in the Kitchen* I had to notice the exact quality of the light and the way a day that had asked too much of me could still be answered by a single lean. To write *The Demolition of Love* I had to stay in the wreckage long enough to describe it honestly. The dark I write in is not metaphor. It is the hour after the children sleep, the hour before the courage runs out. In that dark, a line can be truer than a conversation. This blog is an invitation into that practice. Read slowly. Read the way you would enter an unfinished cathedral — not for completion, but for the reach.