The year I started writing poems, I dreamed about chains dragging along a dusty country road. It was June 1998, six months before my 13th birthday. Earlier that evening, my mother and I watched, encased in a heavy silence, as the local news station reported on the murder of James Byrd Jr. in Jasper, Tex.

Byrd, a black man, had accepted a ride home from three white men. They later beat him, chained him to the back of their truck and dragged him more than three miles. The word “dismembered” entered my vocabulary that night, lodging itself in my throat. Jasper is just a four-hour drive from Lewisville, where we lived. After the report, the newscaster moved on to the next story, but I could not. How old were you when America taught you that being who you are could get you killed?

I was the kind of boy who collected semiprecious stones and kept a telescope by my bedroom window. A book of Greek mythology “for children” was always just an arm’s reach from my bed, next to a notebook of, well, not poems exactly, just stray phrases I’d jot down when I was tired of repeating them to myself. The night of the news report, instead of going to my notebook, I dug through my rock collection until I found my piece of jasper. The stone was smooth to the touch and rust red, the color of dried blood.

The pages of that blue notebook are most telling in the silences. I didn’t write about Byrd because a sense of peril had turned my thoughts into invisible ink.

That October, my mother and I watched a news report about a young gay man who had been beaten, tied to a fence and left for dead in Laramie, Wyo. In the way that anyone in the closet recognizes shards of their self reflected in the lives of other gay people, I knew Matthew Shepard without knowing him. For as long as I could remember, the word “sissy” had chased me, hissing.

This time, though, I felt alone in a way I hadn’t when I had learned about James Byrd Jr. Worried that even expressing concern about Shepard’s murder would give me away as being gay, too, I walked out of the room as if I was bored. Even then, I had refined the art of distancing myself from myself.

I went to my room that night and grabbed my notebook. There was no one moment in which I was suddenly able to shatter silence into language. That night, like so many nights that have followed, was about the attempt — in spite of all of my fears — to try again anyway.

With time, the stray lines I wrote began to collect like raindrops forming small bodies of water. Soon they became poems. Sad, rough little poems written in the voices of lonely, mythic people. I was drawn to myth, I think, because it seemed so distant from the reality of my life and anxieties. No scrawled poems about the boys I dreamed of kissing and holding. Rather than writing in my own voice, I mostly chose to write poems in the voices of characters. As Medusa, I wrote about refusing to look at myself in the mirror, lest my self-portrait become a suicide in stone. As Penelope, I wrote about dreaming of my husband’s body, years crashing between us like waves.

I didn’t have to be afraid of my yearning on the page because I could tell myself, the poem wasn’t really about me. Any voice but my own; any place but here.

In retrospect, it’s easy for me to pick up on echoes of my voice in these women’s voices. The poems were almost always about the tangled knot of gender, sex and desire. How telling that, at the same time, when I dreamed about having sex with boys, I dreamed I had the body of a beautiful girl. Occasionally, I’d write a poem in the second person. “You” felt like playing with fire, but “I” felt like staring at the sun itself; too glaring for me to look at directly.

The process of writing poems felt like a reprieve. Concentrating so intensely on one word and then another and another took me away; so far away, in fact, that sometimes after I finished a poem, I’d sit up at my desk, a bit dizzy. It’d been a blur. What a gift: being able to disappear without going anywhere at all.

A couple of years later, the high school theater department performed “The Laramie Project” for the entire school during a midday assembly. I sat in the audience, rigid and nervous, among my classmates. The play about the aftermath of Shepard’s murder unfolded one heart-shattering monologue at a time. A few girls cried during the play. I envied them and how easily they breathed.

I wanted to be on that stage, speaking words I still didn’t feel safe enough to say on my own, even in the privacy of my notebook. By then, my feelings about Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. had mixed, blurred and melded into a cautionary tale replaying on a loop in my mind: Being black can get you killed. Being gay can get you killed. Being a black gay boy is practically a death wish. The thought was as exhausting as it was unrelenting. I’d started having panic attacks, usually at home in my room. Once, my mother found me rocking back and forth, apologizing over and over again to my empty bedroom.

It would be some time before I read or understood the concept of the personal being political, but when your identity is stretched across the burning crossroads, I suppose in a way you always know. Stumbling through the process of writing those poems in my notebooks, I was just trying to breathe with both lungs, but the journey was political all the same.

It can’t be a coincidence that I started writing poems — bad ones, to my mind, but poems nonetheless — in the first person the same year I started coming out to close friends. Maybe every poem I have ever written has been a way of saying “I am here.” I kept reading, and eventually found my way to the work of other gay black men who were also writing their way into the world. I am here because James Baldwin, Essex Hemphill and Reginald Shepherd have been here. I am here because E. Patrick Johnson, Jericho Brown and Rickey Laurentiis are here still.

When I first read Toni Morrison’s Nobel address and came across the following sentence, I exhaled and copied it into my notebook for safekeeping: “What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.” The edge is where Byrd and Shepard lived and died; the edge is where so many of us continue to live and witness and struggle onward.

I continue to write about life on that edge; the crossroads, the alleyways, the underground rivers. Poetry has become a terrain on which I feel brave enough to witness history and fashion words and images into a response. Sometimes I have more questions than answers, but, at least now, I always have my words. Without fail, after I’ve finished a poem (or when a poem has decided it is finished with me), I feel just a little more fully realized: a man coming into complete and vivid focus.

Saeed Jones, a recipient of the Pushcart Prize and the editor of BuzzFeed LGBT, is the author of the poetry collection “Prelude to Bruise.”