Mental health, vulnerability, and the value of smoothing over

Most of the poems I’ve written in the past two years are meditations on death.

I want to share them, and then I read them, and I think, this is lovely but too sad. I write about the fears plaguing me and how sometimes when the train shuttles between boroughs I think about dying. I see my life flash before my eyes anytime I close them.

And maybe I didn’t realize how bad things were until I looked at the poems and saw in such stark relief my own instability, staring back at me.