Off My Chest
Six lines on why some thoughts only fit through verse — and what to do when normal sentences won't hold them.
Every poem on this site exists because some thought wouldn’t fit through a normal sentence. This one is the meta-poem — the one about why the others had to happen at all.
I need to get certain thoughts
Off my chest
I couldn’t fit it right
With normal sentences
So I turned to poetry
And references
There’s a particular weight some thoughts carry that prose can’t quite support. The lines have to bend. The rhyme has to do part of the work that direct statement can’t. And references — because sometimes the only way to point at the feeling is to gesture at someone else who already named a piece of it.
If you’ve ever started writing a normal email and found yourself slipping into something stranger, this is for you. The thought knows what shape it wants.
— JTC