Double Bind

This is Angelina, and I just wanted to share this poem. It's pretty awesome. It was published in Young Voices 2005/2006, when the writer was 19.

Double Bind

She was never a writer, though the passions was strong
Desire to create bubbled inside her
Rushed through her veins
Lava that could never solidify
Could never be forged into anything
She tried her hand again and again
But the harder she gripped at words
The quicker they melted to nothing

She was never a writer, barely a poet
The few carefully crafted phrases
That had been born in her spirit
And gently welded in her mind
Died after birth on the page
But she clung to them all her life

And as she was never a writer, she became a cutter
Found in the knife the eloquence
That the pen never evoked for her
In simple, painful strokes the desire
Was finally cooled, and she found her peace
She wrote her memoirs in scars
And died with the tragic twisted truth
That as long as she was a cutter, she could never be a writer

--- Ann Beatty