On Writing and a Woman

I keep pens in every room to capture the "A-ha" moment of a pleasing set of words before they dissipate. I collect them. Perfect phrasing is an accident. Good writing is an accident compounded.

Once I met a woman who teaches kids art or kids teach her art, I forget which. She's a little crazy, and I'm okay with that. She keeps colored pencils in vases and sometimes waters them. Crayon mobiles hang from her ceiling, the sharp ends filed down. There are magic markers tucked in with her silverware. She says they encourage spontaneous art. There is joy in spontenaity.

I'm tempted to remove all her yellow writing utensils and keep them in some yellow drawer never to be opened. Drunken epiphanies, phone numbers, and friends' addresses all disappear in yellow on white. But she loves to draw the moon. She loves the moon, especially the crescent moon. I sometimes wonder if she's an Islamist.

Black bores her, so she gives me colored pens. She would have my notebooks look like they fell from a nine year old girl's backpack. The pens sit in a desk drawer, grouped into warm and cool colors. You see, I don't want to dot my i's with hearts. I don't want to have a crush on my best friend's older brother Nick or experiment with writing his last name after mine. I don't want to write mean things about the fat girl in gym class. Although maybe I am the fat girl in gym class. Or the second-fattest.

She likes it when I write poems on her naked body, as if it weren't a poem already. She closes her eyes while I read them to her and trace the words with my fingers. That's a muse. I've spent years trying not to smear the ink. Smearing the ink is the best part. Fuck yeah it is.
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The Idea

The idea still is to celebrate life and its sensations. Keeping the smell of Spring, this idea must remain even beneath the weight of self-doubt, that skinny squinting interrogator whose bony fingers pull me down by my nose hairs (then clip 'em, fool). But no matter how short they are, he always gets up in there. That's what he does. That's his work, and he's good at it, and if it serves to underline my ignorance, that's okay. Life's zip must remain, and I should never assume that I know anything until it feels exactly right.

If done right, life makes the sensitive parts tingle to the point of pain, the feeling that, as the chainsawed, neon-vested city workers approach, maybe motivates the sparrow to sing of its home, "Tree-tree-joy (I sing and fuck, I sing and crap in my) tree-tree-joy." Then the cruel work of the saw, acceptably crazy because you gotta keep the power lines clear.

There will be loss, displacement, and its great sweeps of emotion freeze me, but soon I get back to hammering. I hammer words and chip off more than I should. It's crude, but it's my work. Work is important to a man. In a vulnerable moment, my work allows a clear view inside to anyone who's looking, who has been bitten and not yet dead within.

The idea is I can dance. I just keep the hips loose and keep the mind away. That feels good.

The idea is I can fly. Rather, I can survive a fall.
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Neatness

Clean and arrange, arrange and clean: I do in my home, I do as I write. I leave enough dirt as to not be a prude. Dust is not dirt, black is not white. Her jawline curves, I court her displaced. I tickle my bits, my pieces just so -- several issues to overcome before the hump I over go.
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Pen to Paper

Putting pen to paper feels basic, primitive, just me using the cave wall to make sense of the terrible and wonderful world outside. There is so much out there. The possibilities stagger me.

These words are my vitality expressed through my right hand. They are electric signals, the soul's coded broadcast, searching for another who understands. I want my readers to know me intimately, and I want to be intimate with those who meet an arbitrary standard, which is probably wholly unnecessary, but nonetheless there.

This intimacy refreshes my words, giving me a new physical vocabulary -- the rough edges soften, the contrasts shimmer, everything bathes in a new light. There are more textures and temperatures and playful moments.

My children, the words, play from line to line. They are like me, and I hope they grow better than me. They swing together with innocent curiosity, asking what each other means. They laugh about common letters in constant joyful discovery. They ask inappropriate questions and questions that require an honest answer.

Editing means their death, cruel and objective. The word is here, then the word is not. It dies for a reason, and it will not come back, at least not how we knew it, how we loved it. I kill it with my hand, a black strikethrough, nothing noble about it, just human. It's an act of brutality. Why?

I don't know. It's easier to delete on a computer. There's no body. But the word processor (yes, this) processes words as the meat processor does meat, squeezing them into uniform shapes for sale to the undiscerning masses.

"Good words," they say with a mouth full of them.

"You got an 'r' stuck between your teeth," I say.

The word processor is a cold exact machine that does not allow the letters to touch. In touch there is warmth and humanity and imperfection. In touch there is tenderness -- a balm for a world that sometimes seems bent on wounding us as we try to share.

Perfection bores me. I need a challenge. Imperfection makes something worth reading, worth anything. Imperfections, when seen as beautiful, create love, shards of love, weaponized love. Certain unscrupulous people (though not all unscrupulous people) use this weapon to imprison, and the prisoner doesn't even want to escape.

Words have power: the ability to generate emotion, to inspire, to alter the mind, however temporarily. It is important that they be used responsibly and cared for.
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Editing

Writing exhausts me because there are infinite combinations of words, and none are necessarily better than the others.

Editing gives me pleasure. There is always a solution, and that solution is death. Oh the killing of words! Editing is the written word equivalent of reducing fractions. Reducing fractions gives me a sense of power because I take a big, hulking, macho number and through my very will, through my very being, and sometimes through my very calculator, I knock it down to size.

Take that, motherfucker!

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the blank page

The blank page intimidates me. It is a compulsive liar, an ego strength coach, a gay man with a long scarf and a large man-bag.

The blank page is like the Arctic Circle. There is nothing to build on but my own mind and ice.

The blank page is an emetic. I throw up thoughts, pink and brown and beyond. I am weak before the blank page, but it has no remorse. It demands domination, like (from) a woman.