This piece from Margins of the First Draft is a letter — to my mother, to myself, to anyone who has ever survived the deep seas of emotion. A small reflection on love, poetry, mental health, and the beauty of feeling everything deeply.

(Authors Note)

5. Mother, look at her now

So, can you see now

That I have lost my mind

The sea of emotion has swallowed me whole

And oh sweet mother of mine

Can you tell

Your daughter doesn’t want to emerge

Poetry on the Margins #5 Love of the Mother

Dear mom,
I know that you wanted to save me and hold me in the pouts of my deepest depression.
Yet, I have been lucky enough to have felt life to the extent
that on some days
all I wanted to do was to drink until I couldn’t drink no more,
or to bathe in the sea until I couldn’t swim no more.

Yet I have yet to know no deeper peace than looking at myself and those feelings that I harbour,
and becoming one with them — as ugly, as beautiful, as tender as they are.

And I have known joy to the extremes, just as I have known that I will never,
probably, fit outside any book but the DSM-5-TR.
Yet again, this place where I have always written from —
it has always been there,
so perhaps,
I am not as mad as I made myself up to be after all.

My favorite days were such
where all I wanted to do was to write until I couldn’t say no more,
and for days on end,
I would become a silent echo of my poetry —
a vessel accumulating every little speckle of love and hate and rage,
until I couldn’t hold no more.

I love you, mum.

Links to more of my work:

If you like reading an emotionally packed short story here you can find multiple of them: Six-Sentence Stories, Short Stories, Romance and All That, Dead Poet

And a brand new addition to my poetry tab: On the margins of the First Draft

My band “Chaos in Spring” can be listened to on YouTube, Spotify and other streaming services.