 I just want to keep talking. I have so many words stored up. It's been so long since I've shared them. I just want to keep talking. There's a part. Poetry is this immediate and accessible therapy. You know, poetry is this friend that won't leave. And poetry, through other writers, become the teachers. Words, I don't know where they've been. I'm searching and I'm sifting deep within. I want to talk. I went into the MFA program as a poet and a spoken word artist, but I came out as an ascension word artist. When I got words, I've always had words. I can build a universe with my words. I'm gonna make something nice, big and strong, like a great adventure on Coney Island. I'm gonna make the Grand Canyon with my words. I'm gonna make the paradise. I came to understand, to not just speak the words out there and then to just lose, but to capture them or to record them and you write them down. And then we have this raw material, this clay, to now shape the words as art and hurl them out to an audience that reciprocates. I was here and I lived. And though I didn't do everything right, sometimes I almost didn't do anything right. But I took time to speak and I took time to share my words. On the last day, which was graduation day, standing at that podium, the Lizzie who got up there to read was not the Lizzie who sat down after it. The process itself worked, even though the parts of the process along the way that I didn't understand. But I had this epiphany, so the, you know, chiro, light bulb, moment, all at the same time and everything in the entire pro, everything just gelled. And it was a really awesome experience. And I won't have to doubt whether these words love me or whether they belong to me, because I know they're mine. My blueprints, my fingerprints, my own carbon footprints, there's nothing else for me and that's all right. I have words and my words have life.