Poetry has taken a backseat to teaching, and so has sleep.  Teaching is a 24-7 devotion, because it crucifies you, humbles you, and resurrects you.  I am no longer the same person I was before I entered the walls of Friendship-Edison Collegiate Academy.  I have been baptized in the tears of suicidal teens.  I have cleaned the mark of the beast from classroom desktops. Everyday, I must prove myself to the Pharisees of sophomore English.  They do not believe in me, but I was fifteen once. 

It was that December that I felt the pang of losing both parents, though not simultaneously.  It was then that I stopped writing for the first time since fourth grade.  What did it matter?  I had lost my best audience anyway.  It was then that I first learned that life was not fair.  You can not graduate summa cum laude from one of the best four-year programs in the country and not get a job, and life is fair.  Your do not work three jobs a day to make your dreams come true, only to end up making half of what you are truly worth, and life is fair.  You do not write poems that move people into heaving sobs and not be known from poetry's coast to coast, and life is fair.  No, life is not fair!  It is rather, whatever you deem it to be.  Whatever you choose for it to be though circumstance may sometimes choose you.

With this in mind, I write.  I write at three in the morning.  I write in mid-afternoon.  I write on the train.  I write in the bathroom.  I write in my mind, and I talk to myself.  I motivate myself through fatigue.  I motivate myself through doubt.  I motivate myself through second-guessing.  I read at coffeehouses in D.C., jazzy joints in Pennsylvania, and poetry bars on Miami beaches.  I do self-titled poetry CD's that I forget to promote.  I do birthdays and bridal showers for people I do not know.  I go hoarse teaching students to say poems again and again and again and again, until they make me believe them.  I even subject myself to the occasional slam, because one person in the crowd might actually be listening for content.  I do all this, because life is not fair. But I still have to try.  God throws me another blessing in the form of a candy-coated serrated edge, and like a fool, I always take the bait.  Because I sincerely believe that, in some twisted, convoluted way, this is God's purpose for my life.  My name is Crystal Marliné Adair.