Procrastination:Fear & Writing

This Poem Contains Nudity

Write me, it whispers
inviting. Write me now.

Oh, I couldn’t, I say. I am shy.
I hardly know you.
Your conventions, your breath.
It is too intimate.

Tiptoe through me in ankle bracelets.
Pluck my lines from vines like grapes
and hold me in your mouth.
I want you to know me
from the inside.

I am scared.

In its unwritten state, the poem
is naked, stripped of clothes, of body.
It has no shame, exists without form,
wants a body to enter the world with, any body.

The poem isn’t coy, it is wide open.
I am the prude with the pen, the one
trying to fit its huge expanse of self through this
small inky orifice.

Write me, it whispers.
Write me now.

by Ronna Bloom
from Personal Effects
Pedlar Press, 2000

RB