Yesterday, I somehow managed to make one OK three-part poem out of what started as a single absolutely hideous poem. It was like fashioning one of those do-it-yourself wire tree sculptures that were all the rage in the ’80s. You had to keep twisting and untwisting until something at least passably treelike emerged, then you had to hang little leaves from the wire branches, which was its own surgical undertaking. I was the only one in my family who had the patience for that kind of thing. It wasn’t patience, though. It was something else: the need to destroy and create, to pare and repair, to make what I saw in my mind a reality in the world, not a poor approximation of my mindplay.

Compulsion was on my side as well, not just with the tree sculpture, but in all aspects of my childhood. I loved picking the tar bubbles in the road that formed on hot summer days and solving complicated puzzle games everyone else gave up on and memorizing impossibly long Simon tonal and light sequences because there’s no stopping, ever, until you absolutely can’t continue—maybe you’re out of tar bubbles and have to wait for the sun to make more or you can’t crack the stupid puzzle’s stupid code or your infuriating working memory deficits won’t allow your brain to hold onto any more BEEP BEEP BOOP BOOP BEEP BEEPs.

I stuck with that hideous poem yesterday because I’m an adult version of the child I once was: stubborn, driven, perhaps a little dysfunctional. That poem was a pig, and I put some better-than-Walmart earrings on it, dressed it up a little by tearing it apart line by line and reattaching those lines to create a different creature entirely. Half of it lay on the table by the time I was done. Word, words, words. So many words. Sometimes words are too much with us. They’re like metal tree branches that need to be trimmed or tar bubbles that need to be picked or puzzles and toys that need to be put away and silenced.