Today is one of those days I feel like there is absolutely nothing to say. Tumble weeds rolling through a vast empty landscape of brain. My fingers don't want to type. I want to watch mindless television and think no creative thoughts at all. I feel like I can't do it. Which is exactly why I decided to do this prompt writing, writing practice in this way. For the authenticity. Honestly, without cheating by writing them ahead or using old writing, or any of those things that would make this morning so much more comfortable for me.
Instead we have the empty page and no inspiration, no crow calls this morning, the mist I could feel out my window when I stuck my arm out in the dark has dissipated. So here we go. Live panic and a blank page.
The tried and true prompt when all else fails...
What I really want to tell you is that I miss the skin along her jaw bone where bristly beard bolds its way through and is rough and silky at the same time in my fingers when I tug it. I miss her company even when she's sitting next to me but gone far away. I miss that feeling of home.
I miss the tall of the mountains when I'm driving up and up as far as I can go. That natural world that took me in as one of her daughters and welcomed me and kept me until I had to leave, crying the whole way back into the flat lands. I miss the cold mornings there, the quiet and the icy creek and the feeling of the leaves and pine needles under my feet when walking the wild forest where no one goes except for the occasional hunter sneaking in to shoot the deer that were fearless and tame when I lived there.
I miss my writer's mind this morning with it's bulging card catalog files of images and strange connections and I'm missing my characters abandoned in bad places, waiting for me to cowboy up and go in there and write what comes next. The characters are all waiting for me, there's the dead man in the dead bird tree and the young people who found it, a child deep inside a mind's basement in danger, a dead man trying to decipher what happened in a bad house, a girlfriend whose lover turned into a stranger in the morning, and a very nice pot grower who is in big trouble, and the man who is bringing that trouble. They are all in points in a timeline that need motion. Something has to happen next. I have to write those words and I'm afraid. Afraid I will go in there and never come out again once I start and people will find me years from now frozen, cross legged on the ground covered in unfinished novel. I'm afraid I'll go in and not have words good enough to handle what has already happened. Afraid I won't save the girl in the basement. Afraid I will fail the crows. Afraid the rain will never come and the crops will die and the bad guys will win or the good guys will win because most of these characters are both. I'm afraid I'm in over my head, that I should have stuck with short stories because I'm good at those.
I'm afraid that I can't do it, that I will fail and let myself down and the women in my corner.
What I really want to tell you is that I think I can't do it and that's exactly why I'm going back in. Enough people tell me what I can't do and who I can and can't be. People tell me I dress wrong, act wrong, don't count. People tell me I'm too queer, not queer enough not girl enough, or too girl to be boy or too much, too loud or too quiet, not loud enough. So I'm not going to join them today. Today I'll hold that I can't in kind hands and set it to the side. Because I understand it, I have compassion for it and getting mad at it doesn't always work. So I'll just see it for what it is and write through it.
Mostly I want to tell you about my homeless friend Sonya, who talked to me about reading and writing the other day. She asked me about the writing and I asked her about hers and she ducked her head shyly and I could smell a little sorrowing shame in the air as she whispered that she only wrote journal entries and a little poetry. Sonya who lives on the street and still writes even if she's embarrassed to whisper it to me. Sonya who is skinny from not enough food and has days so bad she yells into the little transistor radio pressed against her ear because she was an activist once before a story I will probably never know occurred. Sonya with the thin blond hair and beautiful smile and blue eyes that I almost never see because she keeps her head ducked and her eyes almost closed when she talks to me. Sonya who was sleeping this morning when I went to get the cat food because we were out again, wrapped up tight in a blue sleeping bag along the fence on Dwight, her hand lettered cardboard sign today said I need food and above it in a bold box was the word Poetry.
Sonya who needs food and poetry and who writes with an empty belly and fear and shame.Sonya makes me ashamed of my own fear and the luxury I have of writing warm, inside if I chose to, with writing community that supports me and people who listen for my voice. I have so much that she doesn't have- but if she has the courage to reach for words today and ask for poetry and food then I can write. I can write and I can take her both. Poetry and food. That is on my to do list for today. How grateful I am for the writers, for all of you and for the writers that write in secret and talk about it in whispers, who think their words don't matter.
It was hard to find a poem, feeling Sonya peeking over my shoulder. This is not the perfect fit this poem.
But I need to find the perfect poem for her today. And that might have to be one of my own. That might be the one that she likes the best. So this is the one I leave for you today...
Anybody Can Write a Poem | ||
| by Bradley Paul | ||
I am arguing with an idiot online. He says anybody can write a poem. I say some people are afraid to speak. I say some people are ashamed to speak. If they said the pronoun "I" they would find themselves floating in the black Atlantic and a woman would swim by, completely dry, in a rose chiffon shirt, until the ashamed person says her name and the woman becomes wet and drowns and her face turns to flayed ragged pulp, white in the black water. He says that he'd still write even if someone cut off both his hands. As if it were the hands that make a poem, I say. I say what if someone cut out whatever brain or gut or loin or heart that lets you say hey, over here, listen, I have something to tell you all, I'm different. As an example I mention my mother who loved that I write poems and am such a wonderful genius. And then I delete the comment because my mother wanted no part of this or any argument, because "Who am I to say whatever?" Once on a grade school form I entered her job as hairwasher. She saw the form and was embarrassed and mad. "You should have put receptionist." But she didn't change it. The last word she ever said was No. And now here she is in my poem, so proud of her idiot son, who presumes to speak for a woman who wants to tell him to shut up, but can't. | ||
Source: Poets.org
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I say some people are afraid to speak. I say some people are ashamed to speak. If they said the pronoun "I" they would find themselves floating in the black Atlantic
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If I say the pronoun I....
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She used to sing when she washed the dishes...
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This is what you need to know or this is what I know...
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May this day be full of words and good food and a warm place to rest.
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