Simon Beans

Writing

Poetry

I was 11 when I discovered poetry. To be clear, I’d heard poems before this and even written a few in school, but I had never felt the power of poetry before 6th grade. In 6th grade, my teacher assigned us to write a poem. My best friend, Selina, was enthralled with the idea and as she talked about how she saw poetry, my brain started to get it. It was going home and writing my own poem, however that changed everything.

My poem was pretty terrible by my current standards. It wasn’t clever. It didn’t capture emotion the way I do now. It wasn’t creative by any real sense, but it was the first time in my life that my soul escaped my brain and landed on the page in a real way. I spent the next 10 years writing poems so often that I had a pen name just for my poetry.

And then I stopped. I had a series of traumatic events happen that shut down that part of my brain. It wasn’t because I didn’t want my soul to escape, it was because the part of me that knew how to do it had gone silent.

When I came out as queer in 2020, I started to write poetry again. Not very often, but periodically when I had a really big piece of me that needed to escape. Slowly, over the years, more and more poems have escaped my soul and landed on a page. This is the compilation of the ones that are worth sharing and not slotted for a book (yes, there will be a poetry book eventually).

Eventually, these poems will include things ranging from my childhood to now, but for now, they are mostly more recent ones. The style will change wildly with the poem, the message, and my feelings, but each is a piece of me that could not be released any other way.