Some history about me. I have told stories, wrote stories, since I first learned to print. My sisters, who are farily good writers themselves, encouraged this fascination of mine. Just around August the year before I turned 11, I started writing poetry. By the Valentine's Day two weeks before my birthday, I had sold several of my poems to my male classmates that wanted to prove to their dates that they were willing to go the extra mile in originality. I didn't have my own date, but I did make five dollars that year, so I considered it a wash. For about a three year period, I wrote poems incessantly, maybe three or four a week. My creative writing portfolio had thousands of lines of verse, a few good, mostly trash, but I hardly cared. Besides the fact that it was high school, and volume counted a lot more than content, I was content to be simply writing. The only thing that mattered was feeding that particular beast.

I mention all of this because over the last two years, I have written maybe ten poems, not counting the half-rhymes I sometimes find myself waking up to. I do at least a free-write every day I have the time, but all of that has been prose. I have a theory for why this happened, but it makes me seem a bit crazy. You see, one of the last poems I wrote was one called "Jeremy Dominguez," which I have posted in e-fiction. An explication of a different poem, this poem was basically taking part of my mind and letting it run away with itself. You know how there is a difference between the speaker in a poem and the author? Well, in writing "Jeremy Dominguez," I accidentally gave my default speaker a name. Later, when I was writing a couple prose pieces for a college writing class, Jeremy was given a history, family, and quirks to differentiate him from me.

And aside from the prologue to that piece, titled "F--cked Up Love Songs," I haven't written but a handful or poems since.

I don't think I really managed to fracture my consciousness that completely, but it is fascinating that a habit that completely ingrained into me went away that quickly. My family is known for such behavior, no addiction seems to stick to us unless we want it to (at different times, all five of us managed to quit smoking cold turkey, and diets are ridiculously easy for us to modify), but this surprised me. There was a slight petering off period when I was concentrating on completing my first novella, but that was all the warning I got.

But not all is lost. I actually wrote a poem for the latest anthology. Check it out: "How to Make a Rainbow."

Gabe