Breaking the Skin: Nicholas Dillman

I love poetry. Without it, I wouldn’t be able to work through a lot of my emotions. When things get tense for whatever reason, I run to pen and paper, my notes app, or my keyboard for some semblance of solace. Music helps me feel my emotions, hobbies allow me to escape them briefly, substances allow me to numb what ails me momentarily, and literature, movies, and TV give my emotions a shoulder to cry on. But poetry, poetry is where I articulate my feelings for myself. While rewriting and editing are usually a positive in order to gain a better grasp of your abilities as a writer, it is the poetry I keep to myself that stays unfiltered, unedited, and untouched after its necessity has decayed. In my small collection of poems for this publication, many are taken from my notebook of unfiltered me.