Screwed

I am writing poetry.  Poetry. I don't write poetry. They are too sickly, too sly, too caught up in their own aesthetics. I don't like it, don't approve of it, don't bother. So someone please tell me why I am currently mass-producing them like an assembly line.

This is both curiously wonderful and disturbing. Wonderful, because I'm blown away by the things you can do in a few lines, in as little words as possible, of the way words can laugh and sob with you, of the way words look on paper, of the personality of speech and language and everything-in-between. Disturbing, because I'm not writing stories anymore.

No. I'm sorry. You don't quite get it.

Story-writing is the one way I become a number of someone elses: narrator, character, dreamer, caricature, time-traveller, government, annotator of problems and solutions, speaker for the layman. It is how I forget the dreary flaws of this existence, and how I step into another. It is how I can make up terrible, disgusting, frightful other-worlds and be thankful I'm in mine. It is how I keep sane.

Story-writing is my life. It's why I take up Literature. It's the last reason jolting me awake in the morning. It is why I stay up late, or sit on the same chair for hours. It's my vocation. It's my special gift from God. It is the single, unmovable, dependable, nuclear essence of me. It is my passion, my heart, my work, my soul, my life, me. It is everything.

Tell me then, what can Poetry possibly offer to come up rival?

'When you're young and talented, it's like you have wings.'
 - Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running