Once, a Chicago Typewriter I Did Not Type Upon

 
I have been a bit lazy, not tired, but almost into it, like a slip into warmth, have become more of a watcher than a wreader. The words could come--that is no problem--were I to have a stronger desire. Instead, I have a paradesire, a cripple's desire to walk but to not-want the effort required of it.

Writing is a writhing of the spirit, a need to make rather than a need to make sense. Production over argument, heart over lung, a means of breathing forth so that a breath inward may at some point be possible. It allows for life.

But only for the writer, whose only true reader is visible, full-face, only in a mirror, though that mirror might be of glass, or rocking water, or soul. A writer's winter is a blank, whiteness, a sheet, a screen, a continuing cold, as in this winter that continues, holds on, fingernails into our skin so that it cannot fall off of us.

Once, I was a writer and strong of word, willing to wrest the word for the rightness of it. Now, I am a watcher. With every letter I see before me on the screen, a bit of light falls away. But there's not enough pixel ink to blacken out the screen. I no longer have the words to keep the snow blindness away. I am almost blind.

Yet there are words. Listen to them prick your skin and crawl into you. Soon, you will be a writer, too.

ecr. l'inf.