A Magazine of Many Arts

After all the poems I have bought from Polu Texni favorite Alexa Seidel, I wanted to learn more about her. You can read more about her at her blog, http://tigerinthematchstickbox.blogspot.com/ or follow her on Twitter at @Alexa_Seidel

1) Do you consider yourself primarily a fantasist or a poet?
If by fantasist you mean someone who spends way too much time daydreaming, then yes, that’s me. Of course, without all that rampant imagination, I wouldn’t be worth much as a poet. If by fantasist you mean a writer of fantasy, then I’d say I’m both. I started writing stories before I ever wrote poetry because poetry
seemed like something difficult and involved to me, something that I didn’t have the skill to accomplish. At some point, I just gave it a shot, and my first poems were really, totally, devastatingly awful. I decided to see it as a challenge rather than a failure though and just kept on trying. I got better. I got published. I came to love writing poems and the more I did it, the more it became natural and even necessary like breath or sleep. By the way, without inspiration from other poets, I could not have done any of this! A few of my most loved poets, alive and dead, include Yeats, Blake (The Tiger is very possibly one of my all-time favorites), El-Mohtar, Valente. So, to wrap this up, I consider myself a writer of fiction who has become
seriously sidetracked by her lyrical exploits.

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She found the words of others in general
to be prayer-dull
even so everyone came to her to speak to her
the devils came, goblins came, gods and demi-gods came,
demons came, mermaids shed their tails and came
in a nutshell
all came, from the cesspool of creation to its finest
and they all gave her words, always words and
nothing but words
no soft meaning, no gentle thought
she found that there is nothing but words to dry the ink on a quill
and nothing but words to dull a freshly sharpened pencil
if only they’d keep their words! she’d think, but they never did
once there came a man
he was just average for a man but
he kept his mouth shut
she was so startled that at first
she forgot to be surprised and just begged him
to come closer like all the others
he did, and when he was close, very close,
he kissed her lips, softly at first, then with desire, feeding her
moisture, gently
their tongues were soon as one and they were shedding clothes
on the floor and took pleasure in one another
It lasted as long as these things do
and when they were still on the floor, close
to one another
he said to her without meeting her eyes: I love you.
she had too, just until he had spoken
as his words spilled from his lips, her desire and passion,
everything she might have given him
vanished like hot breath in winter, like the green from leaves in fall
like the life from someone dying
and she made him go like all the others
after all, somebody else was already waiting to throw words
at her oh so tired ears