K-Stew is a poet.

For a long time now on MobyLives we’ve sought to understand the enigma that is Kirsten Stewart, a.k.a Bella Swan, a.k.a K-Stew. She might be everyone’s favourite brooding YA character but let me tell you now, K-Stew is not-your-average celebrity and everyone should stop treating her like she is.

Your average celebrity does not hate birthday parties. Your average celebrity is not tormented by her wild and wandering heart. Your average celebrity does not wear a Black Flag t-shirt. Your average celebrity would never be cool enough to get actually real tattoos on her real arms. Your average celebrity would not be so rude and offensive to dare to use the F-word in interviews, surely language’s final taboo?

And your average celebrity does not write savagely beautiful poems about Wiffle balls.

Yesterday, we got one step closer to finally understanding the ineffable K-Stew when Marie Claire printed a poem which K-Stew had written just after the Twilight saga had officially ended. There we were thinking there was no way to understand the infinitely mysterious K-Stew; we kept thinking she was one of those goth people or a punk or a rebel or secretly a rock star. It turns out she’s a poet! But of course, how did we not see it sooner? Her purely Byronic behaviour, her waif-like Keatsian demeanour, her Steinian dismissal of conventions (on life: “So it’s fun not having so much control. It’s kind of a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants lifestyle”) and her Beat Generation speech patterns (on childhood: “riding bikes on flat streets and it’s hot as fuck and the air sucks”), it all makes sense now.

“I don’t want to sound so fucking utterly pretentious”, said K-Stew after we’d apologized for not realizing sooner that of course she is a poet “…but after I write something, I go, ‘Holy fuck, that’s crazy.’” Wow, we said, you really are a poet! Please, do go on. “It’s the same thing with acting: If I do a good scene, I’m always like, ‘Whoa, that’s really dope.'”

Marie Claire was even able to shed some light on K-Stew’s deep and fucking crazy creativity and even gave us an insight into her totally dope poetic method:

“She often writes intense little verses, words or strings of words, rearranging them in a process she herself doesn’t understand but believes is somehow essential to her sanity.”

Finally: the essence of K-Stew revealed. K-Stew must write poems to stay sane and stay alive, such is the undeniable strength of the poetic impulse that runs through her veins. It is her life-force. Her raison d’être. Forget about R-Patz, he was nothing compared to poetry.

And so to the poetry. Picture the scene: K-Stew is on one of her wild Beat Generation road trips, driving through the Texan desert when suddenly and intensely her little verses start forming. She sees something in her mind’s eye, but what is it? Is it, could it be, surely not…yes, it is. It really is. It’s a Wiffle ball.

My Heart Is A Wiffle Ball/Freedom Pole

I reared digital moonlight

You read its clock, scrawled neon across that black

Kismetly … ubiquitously crest fallen

Thrown down to strafe your foothills

…I’ll suck the bones pretty.

Your nature perforated the abrasive organ pumps

Spray painted everything known to man,

Stream rushed through and all out into

Something Whilst the crackling stare down sun snuck

Through our windows boarded up

He hit your flint face and it sparked.

 

And I bellowed and you parked

We reached Marfa.

One honest day up on this freedom pole

Devils not done digging

He’s speaking in tongues all along the pan handle

And this pining erosion is getting dust in

My eyes

And I’m drunk on your morsels

And so I look down the line

Your every twitch hand drum salute

Salutes mine …