I Never Knew

I’d rather be at a party
than drinking wine alone.
I’d like to talk with Hemingway
and Gertrude Stein and maybe F. Scott Fitzgerald.
I’d like to ask them their
secrets on what not to write.
Maybe I was born too late.
Too late to have lived in Paris.
Too late to know
that I might become a writer.
A minimalist, sparse with narrative.
I wrote one poem when I was twelve.
and that was it
until I turned forty
when my pain opened up
something
I never knew was there.

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