It is Too Late for Writing
and, though it is so late, I decide to write as a way to keep from writing. I have this urge to write a poem. And only that because I am a poet, which is nothing more than a person who writes poems. Or maybe sometimes a machine that does. The word "machine" spins between meanings as if trapped, and propelled within that trap between opposing magnetic sources.
Strangely, almost inexplicably, I had the desire to write a poem tonight, this night slipping towards morning. Truth is I haven't stopped making poems since I finished my obese 365 ltrs project. I've just focused on visual poems and have kept most of them (it has been four days already) to myself.
My mind is always moving, not necessarily forward, maybe churning in place, but it moves, and that movement sometimes requires outlet, mandates that something be made to record, to memorialize that moving. Words are moving insofar as they convince people to feel something they would not have felt on their own. But that is their value.
I am sipping an armagnac, and slowly, because it is sweet but with a deep flavor like what I would imagine roasted vanilla to have, and because it is the one liquor that sometimes makes me sleepy. Sleep seems necessary, even if inconvenient. With a big project done, my biggest of quite a few yearlong projects I have undertaken in my diminishing time here, there is a little gap in my life, which I filled today by trying to get our wireless printer to work and by cleaning up my accumulated email.
But there is no gap. I have so many projects I have finished through a first draft, so many books of poems, and I need to return to finish them, if only to have the sense that I've accomplished something, the sense that there's some way to save these words from uselessness, to make them work.
So I work a few more words out, as I work it out, as I hope to work it out. I am a writer, which means I write words. It doesn't mean they are good or moving or that there is any importance attached to them, and I care about all of that only secondarily. My primary purpose is to prove my existence and to give myself a voice, for every human needs a voice, no matter how small or little heard, because we need to be and because sometimes we also have to be after we are no more.
The weather has cooled slightly, the night is dark and leaning into humid, and I am the last one left awake in a house, because I am the one who needs to write, with all the little of me there is.
ecr. l'inf.
Strangely, almost inexplicably, I had the desire to write a poem tonight, this night slipping towards morning. Truth is I haven't stopped making poems since I finished my obese 365 ltrs project. I've just focused on visual poems and have kept most of them (it has been four days already) to myself.
My mind is always moving, not necessarily forward, maybe churning in place, but it moves, and that movement sometimes requires outlet, mandates that something be made to record, to memorialize that moving. Words are moving insofar as they convince people to feel something they would not have felt on their own. But that is their value.
I am sipping an armagnac, and slowly, because it is sweet but with a deep flavor like what I would imagine roasted vanilla to have, and because it is the one liquor that sometimes makes me sleepy. Sleep seems necessary, even if inconvenient. With a big project done, my biggest of quite a few yearlong projects I have undertaken in my diminishing time here, there is a little gap in my life, which I filled today by trying to get our wireless printer to work and by cleaning up my accumulated email.
But there is no gap. I have so many projects I have finished through a first draft, so many books of poems, and I need to return to finish them, if only to have the sense that I've accomplished something, the sense that there's some way to save these words from uselessness, to make them work.
So I work a few more words out, as I work it out, as I hope to work it out. I am a writer, which means I write words. It doesn't mean they are good or moving or that there is any importance attached to them, and I care about all of that only secondarily. My primary purpose is to prove my existence and to give myself a voice, for every human needs a voice, no matter how small or little heard, because we need to be and because sometimes we also have to be after we are no more.
The weather has cooled slightly, the night is dark and leaning into humid, and I am the last one left awake in a house, because I am the one who needs to write, with all the little of me there is.
ecr. l'inf.
No comments have been added yet.
