What They Called It

He is having a bad week.

He knows how to name a bad week now. Before he had the clinical vocabulary, before the pamphlet in the waiting room, a bad week was just a bad week — undifferentiated, shapeless, something wrong that he could not locate or address because he did not have the language to locate it. Now a bad week has a name and a mechanism and a protocol and even the naming and the mechanism and the protocol do not make it not a bad week but they make it a bad week he is moving through rather than a bad week he is lost inside of.

August 11, Friday. This is what a bad week looks like in practice:

Monday: functional. Good writing morning, four pages of the manuscript, then a difficult afternoon that he managed by staying at the desk and working through it.

Tuesday: the dream, bad version. Woke at 2 AM, could not go back to sleep, wrote until 5,

slept until 8, the morning writing session compromised by the fatigue.

Wednesday: the grocery store trigger. Boston Road. The cereal aisle. The song. He has already written about this and does not need to write about it again but it is part of the week’s weather and the week’s weather is what is making this a bad week.

Thursday: depleted. The body after a trigger episode is depleted in the way the body is depleted after physical exertion — not sick, not broken, just running at reduced capacity. He wrote. The writing was not good. He kept the pages because he keeps all the pages but he knows the writing is not good and will need to come back to it.

Friday: still depleted. He is at the desk at 7:15 with the coffee and the notebook and the discipline that exists independently of the motivation because discipline and motivation are not the same thing and if he waited for motivation the notebooks would be empty.

* * *

Here is what the world has called it, over the years:

Too sensitive. First applied when he was seven or eight by an adult who meant it as a diagnosis and intended it as a criticism. He absorbed too much. He felt too much. He reacted to things that other people — calmer people, people whose nervous systems had been calibrated in more predictable environments — did not react to.

He has spent decades deciding how to hold this description. His current position: true, and beside the point. Yes, he is sensitive. The sensitivity is not a flaw. The sensitivity is the instrument. It is how he reads a room before entering it, how he hears the thing underneath what a person is saying, how he writes sentences that hit people in the chest and stay there. The instrument was calibrated by his environment. The environment was hard. The calibration is exquisite. He would not trade it.

Intense. Applied in his teens, in school, in early relationships. He was intense. He brought too much to things. He could not simply be in a moment; the moment became material, became something to think about and analyze and translate. This is still true. He has not fixed it. He has stopped wanting to fix it.

Difficult. This one came later, in the relationship. He was difficult to love in certain specific ways — the closed hours, the rooms he kept locked, the way certain conversations had to wait because he could not access what he needed to say on demand. He does not dispute this. He was difficult. The difficult was a symptom. Symptoms are real. Their effects on the people around you are real. He takes responsibility for the impact.

PTSD. The name that finally fit. He read it in the pamphlet and felt the lock turn. He has spent four years using the name to organize the experience, which has not cured the experience but has given him better tools for managing it.

* * *

What they call his damage, he calls his evidence.

What they call weakness, he calls the record of everything he survived without help.

He writes this on Friday, August 11th, in the notebook, in the handwriting of someone who is depleted but present, tired but still at the desk, still holding the pen, still here.

He reads it back.

He keeps it.

He goes back to the manuscript.

The pen moves.

* * *

The comment about self-indulgence becomes a poem.

He does not intend this. He deletes the response he wrote and writes something better and posts it and goes back to the desk and opens the notebook. He is writing about the anger, which is clean and directed and making the sentences very precise. And then: a poem. Not the argument poem, not the response, but something that came through the anger and is better than the anger — is past the anger, is at the grief underneath the anger, is sitting at the table where the grief has been waiting.

He writes the poem in twenty minutes.

He reads it back.

He makes two edits.

He reads it back again.

He puts it in the file with the other poems that are ready. He will publish it eventually, in the next collection or the one after, in the order that makes sense when the collection is complete and the order reveals itself.

He does not post it today. Today it is too new. Today it belongs to the notebook.

He writes: What they call self-indulgent, he calls testimony. What they call oversharing, he calls translation. What they call too much, he calls necessary.

He keeps the line.

He closes the notebook.

He goes for the evening walk.

The city is doing its October thing. The light is doing its October thing. He walks in it.

He comes home.

The notebook is open in front of him.

He moves forward.

* * *

He has been published by five presses, including his own.

The economics of each have been different, the relationships have been different, the degree of control he has retained has been different. He has learned from all of them, including the ones that did not go the way he hoped.

The press that lost the books — not all of them, some of them, a print run that was supposed to arrive in November and arrived in February — taught him to build in lead time and to never assume that someone else’s timeline is his timeline. The press that changed his title

without asking — the book was called Heavy and they published it as The Weight because the sales team thought Heavy was too bleak — taught him to get everything in writing and to negotiate title rights explicitly.

The imprint he built himself, Enrico Port, is the consequence of those lessons. He built it because the alternative was to keep navigating other people’s systems and he is not good at that, has never been good at that, finds the politics of institutional publishing actively counterproductive to the work.

He is not anti-collaboration. He is not anti- publisher. He is pro-control over his own work, which is different.

He built the infrastructure because the infrastructure he needed did not exist.

He is building WordVerse for the same reason.

He will build whatever else needs building.

He has always built what is not available.

The pen is back in his hand.He thinks about what it means to be a writer who publishes.

Not what it means aesthetically or philosophically — he has thought about that extensively and has arrived at positions he holds and will defend. He knows what this means

practically. It means time taken from writing. It means doing the things that are not writing because the writing cannot survive without them. He has accepted this. He has not made peace with it, exactly. He has just kept doing both.

He takes up the pen again.

He stays with it.

He sits back and reads what is on the page.

This is part of the practice too — the pausing, the looking back, the small assessment that happens in the space between one section and the next. Not yet revision. Something earlier than that. Is it right? Is it true? Is it going where it has to go? He reads it back. The afternoon is moving. The window light is different now. The body has been here a long time. He stands. Rolls his shoulders. Ghost lifts his head from the couch, considers, puts it back down. Vincent returns to the desk. He looks at what is on the page.

The work outlasts the wound that made it. That is the whole point. He stays with it. He is making things that will outlast him, that are already outlasting the moments that required them.

He reaches for the pen.

Another line lands on the page.

He writes. He always writes.

Chapter 17

He builds the website the way he builds everything — himself, from scratch, with tutorials and trial and error and the specific stubbornness of a person who has learned that infrastructure does not arrive. You build it or you go without.

The design decisions take longer than the technical implementation. He knows what he wants it to look like before he knows how to make it look that way, which means the technical learning is in service of a vision that is already clear. This is always the easiest kind of learning — when you know where you are going and need only the route.

Near-black background. Not pure black, which reads as absence. A black that still has color in it, that is present rather than empty, that feels like the inside of a very old library at the hour between midnight and dawn. He settles on a hex code and saves it in a document he will use as the design system, the single source of truth for all visual decisions.

Gold accent. Not yellow, not orange — gold, the specific gold of gilded edges on old books, slightly tarnished, more real than pure. He finds the right value through elimination, holding color swatches against the background on his screen until one of them stops being a color and becomes the right color. He saves the hex code in the document.

Cream serif text. He thinks about fonts for two weeks. Tries twelve of them. Settles on one that was designed in the tradition of books printed before the computer, when type was a physical thing pressed into paper and the physical pressure was part of the meaning.

He writes the copy last, because the copy needs to come from the design rather than the other way around. He has the design. He sits with it and he writes:

POET · AUTHOR · SURVIVOR.

He writes: Where words outlive the wound.

He writes: An ancient library at midnight. One book. 121+ chapters. Read them in the order they were lived.

He writes: OPEN THE BOOK.

He reads all of it back on the screen against the near-black background with the gold accent and the cream serif text. He reads it the way he

reads all his copy: out loud, slowly, as if someone is reading it to him for the first time.

It is right. He knows it is right. He does not second-guess it. He submits it.

* * *

The site goes live in 2026.

In the first thirty days: 29,800 requests. A single-day spike of 6,600 on June 29th — organic, unplanned, the result of something being shared by someone with reach whose name he does not know and who has not identified themselves. He watches the analytics with the specific attention of a person who has built something and is watching it find its people.

He looks at the numbers for a long time on the afternoon of June 29th, when the spike is happening in real time, the requests coming in faster than he can track individually.

He thinks: the work is traveling.

He thinks: this is what eleven years of not stopping looks like from the outside.

He does not post about it. He does not say: look, look at this. He saves the screenshot. He puts the phone down. He goes to the desk. He lays the notebook flat. He writes for two hours.

The work is what matters. The numbers are evidence that the work is reaching people. The numbers are not the work.

* * *

He is also building Poe & Port.

Art and poetry on walls. Where poetry becomes omen. Where art speaks in prints. He has been developing the concept for two years, sitting with the question of what it means to take his words off the page and into the physical spaces where people actually live. Not framed quotes with inspirational fonts. Something with more weight. Something that assumes the person on the other side of it can hold a complicated thing.

He has a design philosophy for the print work that mirrors the website: dark backgrounds, gold accents, cream text, the aesthetic of something old and preserved and worth preserving. He has two prints in final design. He has a third in progress.

He works on them at night, the way he works on everything that is not the primary writing — in the hours when his brain is full of words and needs something visual to rest in. He opens the design software and he works.

He is building. He is always building.

His hand finds the pen.

The page receives it.

* * *

He is up at 4:30 on a Tuesday for no reason he can identify.

The body does this sometimes — wakes at a specific hour with the specific alertness of a system that has decided the rest portion of the night is complete. He used to fight it. He would lie in the dark trying to will himself back to unconsciousness, which never worked and left him more depleted than getting up would have. Now he gets up.

He makes coffee. He sits at the desk. It is 4:42 AM and the city outside is its most specific quiet — not silent, never silent, but reduced to its essentials. The occasional car. The sound of something mechanical in the distance that he has never identified. The specific acoustic quality of a city at this hour, which is different from 3 AM quiet and different from 5 AM quiet in ways that he has documented in the notebooks over the years and could probably write a long essay about if he chose to.

The notebook opens.

He writes for two hours.

What comes out at 4:42 AM on a Tuesday in October is some of the best work he has done in weeks. Not the same kind of good as the August morning — that was the clean, precise, knows-it- as-it-arrives good. This is different. This is the underground water finding the fissure. This is the thing that has been building in the weeks of difficult weather finally having enough pressure to push through.

He writes eight pages. He keeps at it. The coffee goes cold beside him and Ghost comes to sit on his feet and the city outside slowly, gradually, gives up its specific quiet and begins to become morning.

He stops when the light is fully up.

He reads back the eight pages.

Seven of them are good.

He types them up.

He saves the file.

He makes fresh coffee.

He sits at the desk and looks at the index card.

Where words outlive the wound.

He still means it.

He will always mean it.

* * *

He reads the poets he loves the way a student reads — for technique, for influence, for the things they can teach him that he cannot teach himself.

His list is long and specific and has changed over the years as his own work has developed and his sense of what he is trying to do has clarified. He reads O’Hara for permission — for the license to be direct, to name the immediate experience without dressing it up. He reads Lucille Clifton for precision and courage, the way she writes about the body with a kind of clarity that does not flinch. He reads Tracy K. Smith for architecture, the way she builds a poem from the inside out so that the form emerges from the content rather than being imposed on it.

He reads dead poets and living ones. He reads poets from other traditions, other languages — in translation, which is its own kind of reading, the experience of knowing you are one step removed from the original and finding value in that remove because what remains after translation is what is most essential.

He reads everything.

He writes in the margins.

He argues with the poets he loves because that is how you learn from them — not by agreeing with them but by finding the places where your instinct diverges and interrogating the divergence.

He is in a conversation with all of them, living and dead. The conversation is the tradition. He is part of the tradition now, even at twenty-six, even at twelve collections, even at the beginning of what he intends to be a long career.

He has been in the conversation since he was fifteen on the floor in Holyoke.

He will be in it until the end.He thinks about what it means to be a writer who publishes.

Not what it means aesthetically or philosophically — he has thought about that extensively and has arrived at positions he holds and will defend. This is the practical meaning. Time is the real cost. Publishing pulls hours from writing. He has accepted this. Imperfectly. He would rather be at the desk. He is always rather-be-at-the-desk. But the work requires more than writing. He does what the work requires.

He lifts the pen.

He pushes through.

He looks at the page.

This is part of the practice too — the pausing, the looking back, the small assessment that happens in the space between one section and the next. He is not editing. Not yet. He is reading. Asking: does this hold? Does it carry what it is supposed to carry? He reads the last paragraph again. The light has shifted. The afternoon is almost gone. His back is tight. He has been sitting too long. He gets up. Stretches. Sits back down. Ghost watches from the couch with one eye. Vincent looks at the notebook. The operating principle: the work outlives the moment that required it. The language is what remains. He keeps going. He is making things that will outlast him, that are already outlasting the moments that required them.

He takes up the pen again.

The line arrives.

The next line always comes.