Am I Vulnerable Enough to Call Myself a Poet?

An essay-poem

You sit at the table you call a desk and the cursor blinks like it's counting a beat in a wrist that isn't yours. Somewhere a woman in a concrete stairwell in Lahore, or a kitchen in Barcelona where the paint peels off in the shape of a continent, writes the word mother and means something that costs her teeth to say out loud. You write the word mother and mean …. what. A metaphor pressed flat between library book pages, dry as a dead moth, its wings gone the grey of old newsprint, crumbling if you breathe on it too hard.

Here is the confession, if you can call it that: you have never bled onto a page. Not really, not once. Real blood isn't the tidy garnet of a greeting card. It's darker at first … plum bruised past ripeness, black where it pools in the crease of a palm, then it hits air and blooms into a red so loud it unsettles the room, rust-bright, arterial, the exact red of a stop sign left ten summers in the sun, gone matte with weather. It smells like a fistful of coins held too long. Like a slaughterhouse walk-in, copper and meat, a smell that climbs the back of your throat and squats there for hours. You have never let your poems smell like that. You describe bleeding the way a tourist narrates a war zone from a rooftop bar three miles off accurately, maybe, beautifully lit, definitely, but the stink…?! It never reaches the balcony, and you make sure of it.

The catechism goes: suffering makes the poet. Confess and you're absolved into art. But your suffering lives folded in the bottom drawer of a dresser painted that flat, exhausted white of a rental unit- not a color anyone chose, just the last coat slapped on before the last tenant left. You open that drawer once a season if you're honest, touch the linen, shut it fast before the smell gets loose- mothballs, and under that something older, something like a church basement in August, damp stone, dead hymnals, dust hanging gold and undisturbed in the one shaft of light nobody's bothered to clean since some year you don't want to name.

Is that vulnerability? Or choreography wearing vulnerability's coat, dried-blood colored, bought secondhand, worn only for the performance and hung back on its hook the second the poem's done — the hook right by the door,so you never have to look far to find your way out of your own confession.

There's a Psalm somewhere- you've forgotten the number, only kept the shape of it, black ink on onionskin so thin light bleeds through like a held-up hand where the speaker says out of the depths I cry. Depths: not the shallow resort-blue of a wading pool in Cancún, but the depths the color of the Atlantic at midnight, a blue so total it reads as black, cold enough to seize a lung, pressure enough to crack a ribcage like a walnut underfoot. Full immersion. Salt scouring the sinuses raw. The particular silence of being pulled under has a color too — not black, exactly. Plum-dark, like the blood, throbbing faint with your own trapped pulse.

You've written poems about drowning. You've never once let the reader watch the surface close over your head — light going green, then grey, then a flat and total gone.

Maybe the real question hiding under the question is smaller and has more teeth: are you willing to be misunderstood in exchange for being known? The poets you actually envy hand you the knife handle-first, blade still wet, and don't flinch when you see the color it's wet with. They don't apologize for the shape of the wound — and a wound is never neat, never a clean paper-cut line, but ragged at the border, flesh going that sick yellow-green of a week-old bruise at the edges, angry pink at the center where the skin hasn't decided yet whether to close, shiny, raw, still deciding whether to become a scar or a story or nothing at all.

Your wounds, on the page, arrive pre-healed. Scar tissue, pale and silver, numb enough to press a thumb into without flinching. You hold up the scar and call it honesty. But a scar is only the rumor of a wound. It's the wound after it's stopped being dangerous. It's the wound with its teeth pulled.

Do you know what you've been doing all this time you write poetry? You want the authority of confession without the cost of confession.

Vulnerability has cultural capital.

Communion needs the wafer to actually break — dry, chalky, dissolving to paste against the roof of the mouth — and still, somehow, against all reason: this is my body. No metaphor left standing between the mouth and the meaning. You want the sacrament minus the breaking. You want the low nave light, the beeswax and cold stone, the wine dark as the plum-bruise blood, red as a cardinal cutting across February snow in some yard from a childhood you keep vague on purpose — you want the whole incense of confession without ever kneeling in the actual dark of the box, without ever saying the actual sin out loud to the actual screen, to an actual set of ears that could actually flinch.

So: are you vulnerable enough to call yourself a poet? Wrong question. Wrong grammar even. Vulnerability isn't a threshold you cross once, a diploma nailed crooked above a desk that nobody bothers to straighten. It's a door — you know the exact one, the one at the end of the hall, paint worn to a pale grey-brown at the handle from decades of hands that weren't yours — and you either open it again, today, or you don't. Every poem is its own separate refusal. Or its own separate yes. There's no averaging the two.

Here is what's true, honestly, no candlelight to soften it, no incense to sweeten the air first: you want the word poet the way a starving thing wants bread…. the yeast-warm smell of it drifting from some window at dusk, gold light pooling on wet pavement, that specific ache behind the sternum that real hunger carries … and you on the other hand keep baking loaves you're too much of a coward to eat, letting them go hard and dark on the counter, uneaten, perfect, untouched, a small monument to your own appetite.

Maybe that's the poem. Not the resolution; you were never going to get one, and some part of you is relieved. Just the drawer, painted that tired rental white, still shut. The blood, plum-dark then rust-loud, still on the inside of the skin where nobody has to smell it but you. And you in the doorway, hand still raised, still not knocking, telling yourself it's not tonight — and some nights, lately, not quite believing yourself when you say that.

And now I am wondering if this essay itself is another beautifully controlled scar?

Have I been using the appearance of vulnerability to claim the authority of having suffered?

— © Misbaah Sheikhh 2026

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