personal reflections

12/9

a night with no arms I wanted to curl into, no kisses or caresses that I dared to tempt. I raised the stakes onto the next day like a bluffing gambler or an addict, but the cards were stacked, which I should have known by now because I was the one dealing, whether I liked it or not.

In a world too big and imminent to not be desperately involved in, struggles sifted like bamboo grass across every horizontal surface, sometimes sharp, sometimes deep enough to fall into and have a hard time climbing back out.

As a writer I couldn't help feeling that really I was putting the real insight off; at least until I shook the academic habit and got the vindictive ideologue monkey off my back.

A million unread pages sat there calmly on the shelves but they made me restless, they concerned me and assured me that surely something is not only wrong but incomprehensible too.

Inevitability would be our sworn enemy through the long and the thick of it, our fated companion who we would fight against and alongside with until the dust dried in the back of our throats.

The sharp cornered comfort that I cuddled with for the moment was the knowledge that at least I wasn't fooling myself, that when at long last our cadre of desperados arrived at the end of the tunnel to find only a cracked mirror reflecting our flickering candles, at least I could let out a hearty laugh that would echo through the dry gardens of unrecorded eternity in utter disregard for every soul that took itself too seriously.

Whether or not the future declares it genius or irrelevant, every second of inaction is a second acted upon, and while the whole wide world la di dahs its way down the grooved track, every little bitty baby has every little right to bite the hands that groove and grease those tracks. No one with a molecule of honesty in their chromosomes can breathe deep these days and declare every little thing alright. But don't worry -- they got that part right -- because worrying is right where they want you, huddled and desperate with no arms that you want to crawl into and no kisses or caresses that you dare to tempt.

beyond aporia.
If we write because we're angry then our words should incite our anger, not diffuse it. If we write because we're lonely we should find companionship in our paragraphs, not solitude. Those of us who write because we're secretly hysterical need to get together at a convention with plenty of freedom and the repression that comes with it, and up against the barricades we'll write on riot shields the sentences that will sentence our angry, lonely and hysterical desperation to the sagging shelves of history that every bookseller dreads. Dancing through the stench of rotting tomes, we'll roll up our joy unfiltered. We won't have a choice, really.