I Know Enough to Know (Wild Text as prompt)

I know enough to know

that I don’t know.
I know enough to know
I’ll probably never know.
I know enough to know

that all this pulling apart of woven things,
all this ripping and tearing and trying to grab
one true thread, as if the truth
is ever just one thread—

I know enough to know
that’s not how I want to live,
shredding instead of sowing,
I know enough to know that
even if we break ourselves apart
beyond all recognition,

we are still
stitched together,
same atoms,
same dust,
same stars,
and what I want in my own little
gasp of life

is to love the world
with the whole of this tangled,
unknowing self.  

Photo by polkovalina on Unsplash

The Prompt

This poem poured out of me today after I spent a few minutes sucked down a vitriolic rabbit hole on Instagram. I am tired. I am throwing my hands up in the air and choosing to simply love the world. Poetry helps. Writing poems helps, reading poems helps, it all helps. Or it helps me, at least, because for a moment, the poem does the holding for me. It holds the knowing that sits just beyond my reach, it sits beside me and holds my feelings with gentle hands, and for a breath, I’m not alone, and it’s not too much. A poem is a lovely thing to carry in your pocket. Your poems are lovely things to carry about.

Here’s an exercise that I just learned in the yearlong poetry workshop I’m participating in (it just started in the end of January, and it’s wonderful—yay!). My instructor refers to it as Wild Text, and it goes like this. You pick a stem—a few words or perhaps an entire line—and then you treat them like a fill-in-the-blank . . . over and over and over again. My poem above begins with the stem “I know enough to know,” and then returns to that stem repeatedly. I invite you to use the same stem as a prompt, too—either the full phrase (“I know enough to know”) or simply the words “I know.”

If a poem spills out of you fully formed inspired by that stem, great! If not, that’s great, too. Try setting a timer for five or ten minutes, then fill in the blank that follows the words “I know” or “I know enough to know” as many times as you can before your timer buzzes. No need to censor or filter or insist upon a single theme. Go wild. Let the words flow. When you’ve filled the page or reached the ringing of the timer, go back and read over what you have. Is there a poem waiting to be born from your wild list? Keep in mind that the poem that emerges may or may not end up using/repeating the stem. Either way is fine. The wild text exercise and the suggested stem are just seeds you might use to get your own magic growing.

I can hardly wait to read what you come up with! Truly, your poems and kindness make the world easier to love.