Poetry Pulls the Splinter Out
Poetry Pulls the Splinter Out
Mike Bonikowsky
On the Painful and Gratifying Process of Writing Poetry
Before the poem, there is the pain. Sometimes it’s a good pain: a stab of delight, an ache of longing, a sudden blaze of joy. More often it is something else: the dull clanging alarms of anxiety, the hot tearing of rage, the long slow labour of the Maranatha agony.
The pain, whatever it is, grows until it can no longer be ignored, then continues to work its way deeper until it can no longer be borne. And then something must be done about it. Somehow or other, the splinter has to come out.
When I was young and knew no better, I would cut patterns on my skin and try to bleed it out. These days I’m more likely to yell at the kids or punch a hole in the drywall or lie under the covers scrolling down on my phone for hour after hour. But there is better, wiser, healthier catharsis, and its name is poetry.
*
I first learned how to pull the splinters out in high school. There were so many of them in those days, as there are for all of us, and all the worse as I had not yet learned their names. I don’t remember when or why, but one day I began writing down what hurt.
It started simply with individual words, scrawled down in a notebook with a plastic orange cover. I wasn’t trying to write poems then, and would have been alarmed at the suggestion. It was an exorcism, an attempt at magic, naming the feelings in an attempt to get them out of me. To my immense surprise, I found that it worked. Writing it down is how the splinter comes out. It’s the only way to determine its shape and its size, where it came from and what it means, if anything. The act of writing pulls the pain out, washes the blood off of it and holds it up to the light where it can be seen for what it is.
I also thought it made me look cool, and might get girls to notice me. I was trying on identities, as we do at that age, and I liked the idea of being the guy in the corner, scribbling down…what? Who knew? It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter if it was good or not, because nobody would ever read it. But I was writing, which most people weren’t, and that made me a writer, and it seemed like that or nothing. So I put on that identity like a mask, and I wear it still.
*
High school ended, mercifully, and I enrolled in a small Christian university’s social service worker program with the vague ambition of changing the world in some undefined way. By now the journal was an ever-present prop, now black and decorated with stickers designed to anger the more conservative of my classmates. I sat in dark corners wherever I could find them and scrawled away, hoping the corners were not too dark for girls to see what I was doing there.
And here grace enters the picture, for the mask began to change the face beneath it. You can’t write regularly, even if the writing is part of a flimsy, self-serving persona, without getting better at it. I was scribbling away, mostly garbage, but I kept scribbling, and slowly things began to emerge that I had never imagined were there, better things than I had been trying for, truer things.
I begin to share some of the more coherent children of the journal with friends through the iconic pre-Facebook blog community Xanga. People liked what I wrote. They shared my words with other people. This threw gas on the fire, gave me a feeling I needed more and more of.
At the same time, I was beginning to feel more and more lost in my academic studies. Without a vocation, the social services seemed more and more incorporeal, the text books I read more and more a waste of money and time. But I was also taking the mandatory English literature course, which was setting my heart and mind on fire. The assignments and essays came easily to me, the reading a joy, and soon it was the only class I was passing. It soon became clear that I could become an English major, or drop out. I switched majors, and began to drown in an ocean of literature.
*
Reading more, and better, caused me to write more, and better. I was now fully immersed in the persona of Poet, which had the sole benefit of forcing me to spend more time actually writing words on paper in order to maintain the illusion.
I won a few small contests within my school. I was published in the campus magazine, which immediately went to my head. I pushed it too far. Intoxicated by my tiny successes, I decided the time had come to burn my boats. I would quit my part-time job and devote myself fully to becoming a Real Writer, earning a living with my pen.
I failed, of course, so spectacularly that not only did I not produce any income with my writing, I didn’t even produce any writing. I did produce some very respectful playthroughs of the Halo series, and a great deal of anxiety and self-hatred. I found myself with more splinters, not fewer, and now no way to remove them.
The truth is that I had never, and still do not, actually enjoy the act of writing. Sitting down to put the words on paper is a sensation akin to peeling the skin from my bones and walking around with every nerve exposed. It’s not something one does recreationally. I don’t write unless I absolutely have to. But the splinter gets in, and it works its way down into the center of me until I can’t stand it anymore. Sooner or later the splinter comes between me and everything and everyone else, until it’s all that I can see. This, and only this, is sufficient motivation for me to write. There are much easier ways to put food in my belly.
*
I stopped pretending to be a writer and found a new job. The work I found was in the social services, a brutal and beautiful job caring for men and women with developmental disabilities. At the time I thought it would tide me over until I finished my degree and published a fabulously successful novel. This spring marks my fifteenth year in the field.
My work in the group home is the opposite of the position of Writer I aspired to hold. It is mostly physical and, dare I say, spiritual work. It does not engage the mind. It leaves very little time for introspection, and less for writing. It doesn’t make you famous, and it does not get the girls to notice you. It is hidden work. It is the best thing that ever happened to me.
A strange thing happened when I gave up the literary life. As soon as I embraced what I now see was always my true vocation, and when leaned into it by acquiring a wife and several children to care for in what spare time remained, I finally became a writer. I no longer wrote to create an identity for myself. I had already been given more identity than I could bear.
I now write because I have to. My true life, the life of early mornings bathing wounded bodies and late nights comforting crying infants, has finally given me what I never had before: Something to write about. Poems now squeeze out of the corners of my responsibility-packed days like oil from the joints of a machine. I am full of splinters all the time because my life is shared with other human beings, and we are always colliding.
The splinters must come out, and poetry is how. And they are, if not good poems, than at least true poems, poems born not of posture but of vocation. I have learned how to share them wherever I can, first on the internet with friends, then to journals such as this one, edited by generous and like-minded people.
This is the last step: polishing the splinter and showing it to whoever is passing by, to see if they know where it came from—what the splinter is made of. Sometimes, often even, I find that others are able to recognize the location and material of what used to just be poking me from the inside out.
Sometimes seeing the splinters in the light of day gives them the tools they need to remove it from their own hearts. And sometimes they, too, are able to see the face reflected in it, and we whisper His name to one another, and are comforted. He is in every created thing, even when those things have been shattered.
*
The poems continued to come, always in their own time, never forced (except for the bad ones), each one a gift to me. They continued to be published by kind people. One of those kind people asked me to come on board this very journal as poetry editor, a post I held for a year. And out of that came an invitation to submit a chapbook to Solum Literary Press, and out of that comes my first published collection, “Red Stuff.” A gift, as it all has been.
It is always a relief to finish a poem. It feels as if I have emerged from deep water, gasping for air, and I always feel as if I will never write another one. But I always do. The world is blowing itself to hell, and there is always a splinter of something or other, working its way inwards towards the heart.
We are all full of the shards and shrapnel of our own bombardments, both large and small. We are all the walking wounded. And though the world is full of sharp things shaped to injure, so has it been made full of balms and medicines and methods of healing. One of the ways we are made whole again is by putting our wounds into words. A poem pulls a splinter out, whether we know why we are scribbling or not.
Mike Bonikowsky
Writer & Developmental Service Professional
Buy Mike’s recently released chapbook here: https://www.solumpress.com/publications/p/red-stuff
Photography by Clay Banks