Did the f-bombs, bomb?

I knew that these new pieces – these #bronisms – might not be to everyone’s taste, but it’s been a while since I dropped a piece on insta and practically heard crickets afterwards. I usually don’t get much reaction to my poetry elsewhere, but by now insta has a rhythm and I guess I missed the mark with the new piece … time will tell.

When working over the new piece yesterday with my mate, we discussed the usage of fucking that is peppered throughout the piece. Now, I’m not one to hold back from using “cusses” in a piece, where they fit. It took a while for me to use these colourful “sentence enhancers” in my poetry … and that hesitation came from continually being told that I swear too much, that it’s a sign of being “uneducated” and I should refrain from doing that … and that it was unnattractive of me to swear as much as do. Besides, there’s a lot of snobbery in certain corners of the writing community when it comes to swearing … esp. in poetry.

So now, dropping “f-bombs” all over the place is just as much a part of my poetry as ignoring punctuation is. But I was concerned about whether I was dropping one too many F-BOMBS in yesterday’s piece … sometimes it’s best to save it to use as a gut punch, and sometimes it’s best purpose is more of a machine gun. And these #bronisms … well, they’ll call for both. I mean, recovery is not fucking pretty.

Being the first part in this new series, I went with machine gun rather than gut punch – and it was a risk. I’m no stranger to risk – most of my poetic work is an acquired taste, and my audience is petite, so sharing my work as widely as I do, is always a risk. As I said, time will tell – I guess.

But I’m not going to stop writing these poems. As I wrote yesterday, it’s another stage of my recovery, and these pieces are coming hard and fast, since I stopped shoving them down. So if they bomb, I’ll save them for my patrons, for the zines, and of course the books. And it may not just be the sprinking of fuck everywhere … the pieces themselves may just be too raw, too emotional, too honest for people to enjoy. My daughter says that reading my pieces can feel like taking a peek into my journal.

Background image from #canva.