Prompt # 89

Blinking cursor on the screen. Today I am working on a piece for a young friend's zine about three words: beauty art freedom. We are invited to define those words in any medium, in any way that we want. Lots of room. The deadline is today and I started yesterday. This is my pattern with writing deadlines. I hear about them and I forget. Or I write it down and forget. Or I remember all along and still manage to forget. There is this self perpetuating denial of good writing opportunities I don't take. If I submit something I might be accepted. Success. If I submit something I might be rejected. Failure. Both are equally frightening to me. I am still in that process of re-defining success. Breaking it down into something manageable. So today I call it success that I am writing at the last minute. I will call it success that I am writing at all with an eye to submission. I need to take some of the feeling of hugeness out of it. I need to make it just something that I do and worry less about the outcome.  Today the words feel far away and distant and sly. I am like a hungry ghost again pulling at the edges of anything that looks edible and it all tastes like dust and ash. Each word typed on the page is another tiny meal in a crazy famine that I've made myself. Wine glasses that are so tiny that my lips can't find the place to sip but I can smell the grapes, the good rich fermentation, dark soil and my mouth is watering with weak saliva. Shallow bowls of soup that smell like roasted vegetables and garlic but my hands fumble the spoon and if I manage to get a bite it tastes like the weak stock like I used to make in the really poor days without enough carrot or a whole onion or to make a real soup. It will get real if I can find some stale ramen noodles in the bottom of the noodle drawer that is empty. It tastes like hot water barely touched by food. The good words are hidden away like the good food is,with a price tag I can't afford.  Why can't I afford this writing? It's free isn't it?  My heart is skipping beats again like it does sometimes. It will pause in it's busy work to keep me here and the world goes fuzzy for a minute. Then it kicks back in again, sometimes racing, sometimes resuming a good steady beat. My heart does this sometimes just because it does. My heart does this sometimes when I am close to unearthing something important, or when I'm fighting a trigger or bad memory or when my old familiar, panic is visiting again.  So what have I done here and how have I managed to do it? Keep the writing from myself. Edited my own life into this I'm a writer who is grimly typing words in when the ones she wants are all locked away. The anxiety is huge. I don't actually know why. My best guess is that the book, is about to hit something important and loud and ugly and true. My guess it that the prompt impossible intimacy, that I am still working on is so incredibly dangerous I don't want to keep going. I have to keep going. My guess is that I am running from what's here to write, and that will always make for a hungry ghost. Because those are the words that are waiting for me and the more I write around them, avoid them, the shallower the soup bowl gets, the tinier the wine glasses get and the more my heart races and my mouth gets dry. Starving for my own words. I know these hands I'm looking at, that still look like a working woman's hands, rough skinned and capable, can type if I can be brave enough shake the words loose in my head.  It's all still feeling lost to me today. I am feeling lost to me today. I want to backspace the shit out of this writing. I want to start over. Set something on fire. Throw out all my books. Carve on the walls. Get out the spray paint. The metaphors in my head are all loud and violent. That's good. Scary but good. It means that the writing is coming and it won't be pretty and you may never see it. I may hide it with the other writing that no-one will ever see. Or I may share it. This is good too. These words are hopeful. The writing will happen. I just have to keep going till I get to the things that are wanting out of the darkness and onto the clean white paper. I will not backspace today even though I want to. I will find something that my stomach which is a knot of sorrow and queasy can digest. I will find words that feed the empty spaces on the page. I will find a way out of this self imposed word restricted diet.  What about you? Do you ever feel like the words are an extreme of  feast or famine? One of the other? How do you make space for yourself to keep going?  Your characters?  This poem is a prompt. The title and every line. See what sparks you today to find your own good words,  your own important stories, real or fiction.  I'll Write the Girl   by Jan Beatty The thing I'll never write is the green leaf with its rubbery-hard veins, I'll never write the structure exposed, instead I'll write the girl picking it up, green leaf, her pudgy hand & her wanting it, that's it, because she knows the sky is full of stumbling ghosts, & she's back in the cold room, back on the dark floor, & along so much sky, what does one person do? She says, bring it to me & devours, hungry girl, breaks it open, tastes the day's first plasma of leaf, first blood of green on her city street, she takes it to her like morning's first kill, & owns it, stem to point, & knows her life will always be this biting open one thing to leave another, that the only way she'll get anything is with this tiny hammer in her animal brain saying: mine, & again, & now. Here's what speaks to me today-  I'll write the girl   *** the thing I'll never write is  *** saying: mine and again and now  *** she says bring it to me and devours *** I am grateful for your words,  your reading,  your witness, your brave and your work- even if it's still in the dreaming stage, and not yet on the page.  Grateful for you.  May this day be good to you and your creative.