I'm Major Jackson, and this is the slowdown.

At a public talk, someone said out loud, I do not feel. I have no emotions. So, I write poetry to produce my emotions. Poets often think of their writing as an excavation of emotions. Because society asks us to repress our inner lives,

we write to bring to surface embedded feelings.

I have long espoused poetry as a means of achieving personal expression,

but that poetry generates emotion in the person who does not have any emotions

is new to me. Essentially, the speaker confessed to lacking sentience, that writing creates them

rather than unearths them. Imagine eating a peach and not experiencing its texture,

juiciness, sweetness, only until after you sit down to write a poem. Or imagine boarding a

heart-stopping roller coaster that suddenly drops, but you do not feel the terror of the ride until

that moment you find language to describe it. It is a wondrous idea that to write is to complete

human activity. Today's poem points out to how and where in our bodies we experience the world.

I'd like to believe that my senses are open as I take in music, food, travel, new adventures, new friends.

I'd like to think poetry makes me extra sensory. But then again, my wife would argue I spend too much time in my head, thinking my life away. I enjoy how today's poem makes it a goal to be keenly aware, intuitive, and innate.

What the Body Gives Away by Saba Karamati.

I wear a new pair of shoes to a friend's wedding and the backs cut into my hills.

I hide my bleeding throughout the night,

pretend it does not bother me.

It's a familiar phenomenon by now.

My therapist asks me,

where in my body I feel my hurt,

and I say my mind,

but I don't know if that counts. T says that it is Western logic, but I wonder

...