Writing Dark Poems

A few days ago, I wrote two dark poems, perfectly in keeping with the Halloween mood around our neighborhood.  In my writing class, my small group noted that a theme in the poems I read two weeks ago was lost innocence and stolen childhood.  Since that seems to be an overwhelming theme in my life, I explored that more and wrote two horrific poems.  My husband read each poem and found one more disturbing and terrifying than the second. When I wrote them I was so happy, proud, and excited that I wrote the best quality poems of my life and that I took control of this recurring theme in my life.  I couldn't be more pleased with the poems, but today I still feel like I can't wash them off of me, like I'm walking around with the film of them all over me or like I am carrying them around in my arms, unable to put them down. 

I think it's funny and telling about me that I enjoy writing children's stories and tend to oscillate between writing happy, loving tales of talking animals to gruesome, Poe-esque poems that are too creepy and honest to let my children read.  Maybe that's balance, but maybe it's more like the part of my mind that needs to touch the tragic things to put them to rest also needs to find some comfort in happy stories of childhood.

I'd like to find a little more middle-ground in my writing, at least until I no longer feel saturated in the macabre of my poems, particularly these last two.  I do have two short stories in process that could give me balance without going to the extreme of writing about sweet bunnies and chipmunks.  It's hard to know if I should just continue on my dark poetic path and just get it all out, purge myself of everything that's bothering me under the surface - there's a lot there for sure. 

For today I know that I am physically exhausted from allowing these two memories to come to the surface and from the energy it took to touch them in my mind, look at them directly, and mold them into something artistic.  It makes me laugh (a sinister, terrible laugh) to think of these horrific stories becoming art as if I molded clay from the depths of hell to make a pretty pot.