As it roars, call it a tiger.
Call it burning bright, black and gold –
Swoosh of fur and silent gaze,
The thunder, fury and the thrill
Of seconds’ hanging on.
They weren’t joking
When they said don’t lose your grip.
But this secret grin doesn’t care.
It’s every writer’s fear, the question1 that keeps us up at night: “Am I a writer if no one reads?”
If you see a parallel to certain notorious ponderings concerning trees and forests…you’re correct. And yes, it’s ridiculous. The identity of “writer” derives, ipso facto, from one simple act. Can you guess what it is? Hint: it’s in the name.
I know it, you know it, it’s the biggest secret everybody knows: just put words on paper2. Heck, they don’t even have to be good words. That’s what editing is for. So yes…a readerless writer is still a writer.
But writers are greedy. They don’t just want to be writers. No, one identity isn’t enough. They want more. They want to be loved. They want everyone to walk around all day and all night, circadian rhythms be damned, with their words incubating in their skulls. Writers want what good songwriters have: that little trick of becoming infectious.
Here’s a tip. If you need to take out a writer, don’t count on silver or crucifixes. There’s a simple question that slays writers, stops ‘em dead in their tracks – poisons them with writer’s block, terminal angst, and the rest of the stereotypical nonsense:
“How do you make something so intoxicating that no one can walk away?”
How do you take a piece of someone’s brain3, 4 – and make them want you to keep it5?
Honestly, writers are still making up their collective mind whether their next career transition will see them as zombies or heroin dealers. It’s a toss-up. The odds don’t look good for the non-writing populace6.
But one thing is clear: writers are, every one of them, stricken with a helpless and uncontrollable urge to infect the population with their words. Don’t prep for the Zombie Apocalypse, kids, the Writer’s Contagion is already among us.
Bonus tip: If you’re still short on readers, duct tape works surprisingly well. Just a word to the wise.
1 Well, the second of two – the first is: what if tomorrow there are no more words?
2 Screen… whatever. Allow me my romance here.
3 Nothing on WikiHow. I swear, the DIY community is only there when you don’t need them. They have how many tutorials on painting your nails?
4 “I swear, Officer, I was only writing – what does it look like?”
5 “All I want is your brain…” – not a great conversation starter. Even Marc Antony only got away with borrowing ears.
6 At this point I’m honestly just curious how many footnotes you’ll put up with.
What if tomorrow – all the words stopped?
What if I was reduced to typing the alphabet, over and over again?
What if the words’ departure wasn’t a sudden catastrophe? What if the words slowed to a trickle but didn’t quite stop, just turned muddy and stagnant like a runoff stream in high summer. It begins with this next sentence I can’t quite grasp.
Or what if it’s already begun, and no one has told me. “Are you going to?” “Should we?” “Naaaah… Maybe tomorrow. Maybe it will have completely stopped by then and we won’t have to.” “Oh I like that plan!”
Maybe the words just lose their savor over time. Maybe it just means less and less to finish a piece of writing. I’ll end up like a heroin addict chasing the dragon: never as good as that first time, that first shot of pleasure that sat up, licked its chops and growled,”Do it again.”
Maybe it will stop once every part of me worth saving is plastered to the page. They can keep the collection pinned to cotton under glass, a museum display or coffee table curiosity for hipsters.
Maybe I should get a grip, take a walk, put my inner drama queen back in a padded room, and get back to work.
After all, this was just a systems test. The words clearly haven’t stopped yet.
To each of us, today means something different. It may be a day to rest, grieve, bake, call family, or simply business as usual. Whatever your day holds, thank you for sharing this piece of it with me.
I woke up at 3 a.m. from a restless dream of trying to remember where I’d stored my childhood Easter decorations. Specifically, my dream-self was rummaging for a small, rotating German music box with carved wooden bunnies and slots to hold eggs. I loved that thing. It’s at my parent’s house. I promptly fell down the rabbit hole remembering Easters of my earliest childhood, when my mom still had energy to clean the house and decorate a month in advance, drape the house in black lace for Good Friday, and collect onion skins and beets to dye hard-boiled eggs pink and gold.
Today will be different from those early Easters for quite a few reasons, but I’m glad I found the memories nestled in my morning. Now I’m off to call my parents and thank them for putting up with me all those years ago. Whatever your day holds, and whatever meaning it holds for you – I hope you find a beautiful memory to savor sometime today.
On Good Friday, I came down
To a flowering tree wrapped around
In black lace. My mother’s gift of understanding:
A story is not always what it seems.
Saturday the kitchen hummed
Steam and simmer, work to be done –
“Stay out of trouble!” – that night,
Through hard bench and incense,
I napped through vigil towards morning.
Sunday bright, pink and gold
Beet, onion skin stain bright and bold
Eggs in a basket. Through quake and gardener,
Eggshells hold. These colors’ gift of mystery:
A story is not always what it seems.
It’s an old evolutionary tale: adaptability beats expertise. It’s better to create than to know everything.
I write from curiosity,
because the world may not be enough
To hold the otherwise unsaid.
These words left lonely, stillborn
Impossible springs and twilight tears
soft shadows of a question mark:
What do you create towards infinity?
Is it important enough to say? Is it important enough that you can’t avoid saying it? Rather: what is the price of not speaking? (“I say only this, the things too important not to say -”)
I speak because there may not be time
For the things too important not to say.
Here is the most important question of all: creating at a world’s end.
What do you create at a world’s end?
Tuck in the threads and rework the song
Craft its ends into hidden rebirth.
We are here to work, we are here to listen,
Tie off ends towards memory, towards forgetting –
Snip the artery, tie off the vein.
In the needle, within the weft; in the warp and in the hum
You may lose the art of beginning again. Let it go.
Sometimes you must lose pain,
But all artists donate organs. Today I give you my heart.
The act of creation is implicitly one of questioning authority. You are implying that God and your mother didn’t do the job right the first time. What other authority figures might you question?
Is there any question mark to mark this??? Make my mark, mark the record, history will mark? (…Will it?)
Does any artist have the option of escape
Except by the trick of their own fate,
The small trick of asking why
This doesn’t yet exist –
Utopia? At world’s end.
A small price to pay
For a heart.
Here is my only true confession: forgive me impatience, anger, apathy and pride. Whatever remains, let it remain in love.
Given the choice between my work or my life,
Curator’s Note: Pencil on paper, c. early 2020s PC (Pre-Crash), Austin, Texas. These fragments were likely part of a notebook or workbook. They were found during an excavation of former Austin apartment complexes by a team from the University of Texas at Big Bend.
Vulnerability is one of life’s longer lessons.
In my case, the lesson didn’t start to sink in until age 23, when it finally dawned on me that presenting perfection may not be an ideal recipe for friendships. I’m still learning.
The idea of friendship aside, I eventually began to understand that perfection is not even a good approach for working relationships. This arises from the principle of “consider the competition.” The aura of perfection produces exactly one outcome on a group of people: it makes each individual feel that they, too, must be perfect.
A group of people trying to be perfect produces a group of people who are bad at communicating, stunted at sharing ideas, incapable of realizing they’ve made a mistake, and abysmal at fixing that mistake. To put it concisely – it is a fatal distraction from competence.
In the context of competence, vulnerability is not over-sharing. It’s understanding the relevant flaws and blind spots which may harm a goal – whether the goal is a finished product or the ability of a team to work together (possibly one of the most basic, crucial, and therefore difficult, goals).
Inevitably, one of those flaws or blind spots will arise from you. Do everyone a favor and mention it. Use humor or strategic doses of self-deprecation as needed. Make it clear you are prepared to be honest with yourself and straightforward with others. This may have the odd and unintended side effect of building trust.
It kills me to admit it: even now I want to be the expert – the expert on (apparently) lack of perfection. Dear Lord, child, what a tangled web you weave for yourself. Well, there’s a point to this admission of squishiness. Be realistic with yourself about your flaws and inadequacies, because good work has no room for blind spots. If you value good work, quit blinding yourself by trying to blind others. There’s far too much work to be done in this world to excuse trying to rescue your ego at the inevitable expense of your honesty and effective intelligence.
It’s a long lesson, like I said. Gentleness doesn’t come easily. But who knows…you might find a few friends along the way.
My Lord, my listener
You patiently wait
Through the long-drawn breath of my time.
What you gave to me
Will return to you
(Anyone’s guess where the borrowed ribs go) –
This breath that covers my eyes
And clears my sight;
Beating membrane’s spark;
These things alone
Will return,
You to me to you
When you are finished speaking
Through my voice.
I look for gifts in unusual places
The quiet lonely spaces
And the lots overgrown.
The tangle of words
Where a thought shines free,
The memory that holds a life:
Who am I to refuse these things?
The glimpse of a seed
Or the leaves blowing restless – see,
My own words, my own worth,
Is held in a thing just as small.
I speak only this,
Words too important not to say:
The story of countless other
May otherwise sleep untold,
But they gift infinity within their glimpse of life.
Chirps and squeaks and red-yellow hum
The royalty draws down the red.
Color of passion and UV vibration
Dripping, Kool-Aid, plastic temptation
Impossible feathers that take rich repose
Of a full three seconds, sparingly dosed –
Ah, wings at the window. I suppose
The hummingbird feeder is empty.
I tried to take a picture, but you can infer how that went. There are, in fact, two hummingbirds that have claimed the feeder, and the nectar disappears unnervingly fast. And in case you can’t tell – I love watching the tiny terrors. No matter how many times they show up it’s a major excitement every time.
Masked like a bandit, my gaze undoes
The rules of yesterday’s child.
Sweetness with bones and muscle unclenched –
Who knew Easter lilies’ mad scent
Was more than a match for precaution?
Two things occurred this week. First, my grocery store distributed face masks to all employees. Second, my grocery store received a huge shipment of Easter lilies. Now we all look like bandits, and the lilies are stacked in piles of jungle amid cases of water, pallets of dog food and essentials like ramen and toilet paper.
The world feels a bit muted with a mask to filter out the store’s aromas. I usually navigate the place by my nose: cheese, coffee, bread, blood, cardboard, guavas, cleaning supplies. They all tell me something, new secrets each day. Now I keep my own secrets behind a couple layers of blue material. It turns out the lilies’ earthy musk is one of the few scents that can make it through – and it puts a secret grin on my face every time I catch it in passing.
Skeleton At The Feast