Broadside
My words find themselves
In a coffin – in mud they flower
Like a lotus without an ego
I educe furtive patience
Through tolerable effigies
Put elbow grease into it
Like a furrier or impala
These concessions are donors
Of instrumental organs
Like a locked junction box
Impervious, doomed empires
Room here – in the jugular
I touch your maxillae – your
Golden skull cap with my tools
Spy this mattock in hand
As I fiercely nail this tooth
To my father’s namesake for
The keys to the nascent idea
Recant this rule – engage
The physique of narcissism,
Piccaninnies, jonquils on
A slope, the sky rufous
Narcosis takes a rum flight –
The galloping sea breeze
Salt in caves of mouths
Feels like a webbed pellicle
Doing a slap-bang runner
In rush hour – here is
Slashed phyla on my plate
Pert sleepers no more
Letters loved and lost
There is only this wood left
To pounce on – revenge.
The end.
Evening
Winged sleet is only
Sufficient in memory
Hinted at in atlas –
On maps; geography
Down came the rain –
Housed with you in
Its grasped picture
You came dying – shut
Out undone in streams
In wet rivers of dreams
You glide, flocked, awed
Pressed unaccompanied
Once flung into flight
Your arrival immortal
I envy you – the
Stars in your eyes
Like dew – your tears
Are the tears of a
Hero exhausted
From blows – a barren
Silence in which
Nothing fertile grows –
Weeping pours out of your
Heart as if you were
Soulless; moulded you
Effortlessly – gave your
Self worth although
It aged you – you
Brought me to a home
Cradled me as if
I were nothing just
Waiting to be rescued
Waiting to be saved.
The end.
You
You –
With the dark sorrel
Hair save me?
I’ve lost you –
And I only have
Myself to blame
Bookish now –
I’m alone and sad
This boomerang
Has kept me going
For the ladders of these
Past ten or so years
It’s been a waked boon – oh
It’s been a wild ride to get my
Ego from A to Zero
Monsters have come and
Gone – grown inside of me
With legs as strong as elk
Lazarus or a Pharisee
Gems, mother-of-pearl –
I’ve roused too late
I’ve come to the thawed
End of my bloody, damned fluke –
I wish, I wish, I wish
I could take it all back brick
By brick – but every time I hit
A wall, a monsoon, a mistake
What warrant of
Success is there that you will
Break – that you will speak
This waif wails –
But can you hear her?
The gift of her voice.
The end.
Something about the life of a writer
Words flock
Onto the page –
I am left numb
Like a wadi
Any cold, wet thing
It dissolves
Subtly – unseen
Into a host of wounds,
Depression
Invalids,
Deaf mutes – the gut
Of a wind
Like tiny hands
It reaches out for me
It coos straight
From the shell
Of a heart – a
Fragmented
Wakened state
Of dreaming –
Like an infant
It is gone, gone, done
Grown up in years –
Matured, ripened
Like the brick walls
Of a house by the sun’s
Summer heat or fruit
Even the very small ones
Their welfare is pure – and
Carry a gravid weight
Wedlocked to words –
This is something of the
Life of a writer.
The end.
The poet
Loosed – this gesture comes with
Maternal pride; ceremony across
The page, they are not strangers –
Instead they comfort: even the
Savage, alien beasts – their deaths
Breasts are magical, a temple of delight.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Saturday, October 9, 2010
Five poems
The blood orange sky
My brother and I believed in ghosts from an early age.
When we were little we thought they would haunt us to an early grave.
They drowned in the air like swastikas; armies in flight.
When they went missing we would try to find them
Again picking on the words black, shelved, barren, lit them up in the
Orange sky as if it was a furnace burning at Auschwitz.
I wanted to be the woman who gave you everything.
Instead I came with darkness, a wreck that was visible, cats,
So I hunted my brother down; swore him to secrecy.
I could see the boy in him still; even in the fog – with
Flecks of blue marbled sky dissolved in his eyes I kept him safe,
Warm; beguiled in my arms before I let him go.
The end.
In the natural backyard of poets
Here you will find golden pauses between acts;
Ends of affairs, pangs of love and where an ache will not subside
Here, the clinging, useful comfort of strangers
Tucked away in the wells of loneliness in the thick of things;
Butterflies whose paper-thin wings melt in the air
Here, patches of beads are worked intricately at a snail’s pace,
As white horses in playing fields, prayers in temples, a home for words
God’s little selves; others
For those of us who like poetry and their mirror images –
There is strength here underneath this web of smoke
The strength of an army, a swarm, an exit, human bodies
Only later you will realise that there are limits and boundaries
Bars at the windows to keep the ghosts out
Webs carry lisps of substance, wounds that are slow to heal –
Where broken links surface like Yoruba girls dancing barefoot in the
Rain; it feels like the Gestapo
There is a light and warmth that beckons with words like
Memoir and futurist – they feed the poet’s soul
As if I have drawn a zero – a mouth opening and shutting
Slicing through the air where it should not be – interpret is as you will;
This abacus, this alphabet
How do children grow when they do not play is like asking
How do poets fill themselves up cognitively when their minds
Are a black, alluring habitat
Until glory is all yours
A small, loosed hunger giving you grief inside your belly
That not even a mad man can cure
Mine for the taking
She appeared before me as if she came on the wings of an angel
Nursing me back to health; she never let go – mother kind.
The end.
Stars that begin to fill the night sky
While we sleep, while we eat, while we dream in tides
Every night they make their tribal mark on civilisation
The yellow sunlight of the white sun has now dissolved
The din that suffocated us like a forest of trees is now
Thinned, walled in by rooms that are deathly quiet like
A mannequin’s paradise escape – the flurry of a tongue
On a belly; I can feel the heat of the wind floating on air
It’s not mournful at all; not like stories of the holocaust
Understanding the measure of loss of love is not easy
It simply takes possession over everything in your life
Left with a gold watch that could no longer tell time –
A staged, petrified memory in which there was no longer
Recognition of stealing touch and comfort out of routine
Silence has come and gone; suffered with the dark hours
I don’t know why I felt like nothing in your life – I cast
Words like stars into the night sky’s shadow; thrust them
Into predatory familiarity, the material of velocity, pieces
Of fecundity; imagery that we shared as sisters growing up
Speak, speak, speak now voyager, saboteur, even if your
Words come as an abortion of small nothings; with a splash of red
In slow motion; don’t hold anything back as you have done
For years: in war humanity behaves at its worst and you have
Done the same, I would only like to garner access to you –
To your private, imaginative world – I have loved you from
Afar for my whole life, alas, these cancer years sought a
Substitute, under stars laid attractions to spools, negatives
I trace your eyes, your wild hair; your teeth of pearls all in
One place with my fingertips self-consciously – they all say
‘Do not come too close’; up close you’re delicate, a flower
Whose blooms are not yet set in place – ripened by the sun?
Yet I feel you against my skin, after all aren’t we mirror
Images of each other born on the same day; years apart?
Here they come, here they come: salutary never haggard
These stellar posers; one by one not stentorian reminding
Me of your rounded figure built for comfort and not size
Tell me what you want to hear; a moveable feast of words?
The end.
The wounded pilgrim
When I was a child I was afraid
To speak to strangers; even then
I felt estranged from the human
Race, sought solace, a rare comfort
In books and in between the neutral
Spaces of the black letters of the
Alphabet that spread itself across
The pages I sought transition from
Childhood to puberty; a word I am
Still not very fond of; it meant growing
Up behind closed doors, shutting out
Dark voices; sensing there were no
Clouds with silver linings only
Cries of thunderstorms and lightning
Streaking across the sky in the night air
I was a good girl done badly by
Not as bad as some yet still locked
Inside a box with doll parts and the
Garden of a blank canvas perfumed
With the bright, still air of reality
Children can only be fragile warriors
But the canvas was uplifting and the words
Could all fit, musings, brick by brick?
The sun on its belly ripening even more
Poetry with keys, something absurdly
Supernatural in effect like the holier ark
Trailing behind the titan machine of my
Consciousness; sometimes the story
Begins at the end with no middle or
Beginning; sometimes not at all but it has
Educated me on so many things that blood
Is thicker than water and that families
Are not pulled out of the air for nothing
They exist to terrorise you, to bully you,
To grow you up into a worthy citizen or not
For the reasons that you think.
The end.
In response to Bride and Groom Lie Hidden for Three Days by Ted Hughes
Ritual
Michael’s ghost comes to me with the weight of water – I drink
In the lines of his face, blur the edges; bottle them up in memory for a
Keepsake of a perfect solidarity, stitch the laughter, the inner battle studies,
The bittersweet imprint of two bodies, star-crossed lovers, self-portraits that
Flower at the commitment of first time lover’s closeted togetherness
He has given me something; new eyes; shameless jewels, diamonds,
He scrounged about on the ground for his own in the rough;
Waited patiently until their gestation period came to an end,
He takes my own hand in his, I watch him like a spectator; his
Body is made of glass so I touch him tenderly as if he might break
You are the painted groom in the forest of the moonlight – you
Cover the mouths of dunes with your skin; there are no fences
Where you come from, there are no children here; there are
Golden rings on our fingers, wedding bands to mark the state of
Our unions to mend this focus purely – I needed you for awhile
This path, this door left ajar to remind myself of my swallowed up,
Rehearsed fear of being alone, a flock gave me hope, this furnace
Gave me the fear of being placed by an anchor, oh, joy, what is
This gift – I am choking on white, I let the angled beast in too soon
Black dogs as black as a river bark madly at the presence of wounded
Ghosts but they don’t keep me awake for long – I thought I wouldn’t
Know what do to with these stages of infancy that I have given birth to;
Baited with trailing, unnamed hooks; I pick at his birthmark, scratch it
With a nail as if it’s a tattoo, the plum of a bruise; I hit a wall, there are
Woods here – unburdened, finally loosed the weight I’ve carried
His clean, pale, bitten fingers are as remote from me as the light on sea glass
Or a wet, streaming tadpole; we are done with the night, I try not to dream
I can smell the scent of your ruffled, yellow hair like feathers on your pillow
I am in the minority now, I surfaced like winter, as wet as snow, as heavy
As the storm on the other side of the world, as weather; as if you didn’t know
My heart says love is intense; the heavenly shine of lust on the mind is brief
I watch you sleep – if I could slay your dragons, I would, I have numbers
For company, silence, a golden roost of mounting words sinking without
Feeling too much self-conscious, they burn, harvested on the bare, mute page
Those islands in neutral territory, if lust was not temporary then where
Would we all be; physically, humanity without alchemy – anonymous; I’ve arrived.
The end.
My brother and I believed in ghosts from an early age.
When we were little we thought they would haunt us to an early grave.
They drowned in the air like swastikas; armies in flight.
When they went missing we would try to find them
Again picking on the words black, shelved, barren, lit them up in the
Orange sky as if it was a furnace burning at Auschwitz.
I wanted to be the woman who gave you everything.
Instead I came with darkness, a wreck that was visible, cats,
So I hunted my brother down; swore him to secrecy.
I could see the boy in him still; even in the fog – with
Flecks of blue marbled sky dissolved in his eyes I kept him safe,
Warm; beguiled in my arms before I let him go.
The end.
In the natural backyard of poets
Here you will find golden pauses between acts;
Ends of affairs, pangs of love and where an ache will not subside
Here, the clinging, useful comfort of strangers
Tucked away in the wells of loneliness in the thick of things;
Butterflies whose paper-thin wings melt in the air
Here, patches of beads are worked intricately at a snail’s pace,
As white horses in playing fields, prayers in temples, a home for words
God’s little selves; others
For those of us who like poetry and their mirror images –
There is strength here underneath this web of smoke
The strength of an army, a swarm, an exit, human bodies
Only later you will realise that there are limits and boundaries
Bars at the windows to keep the ghosts out
Webs carry lisps of substance, wounds that are slow to heal –
Where broken links surface like Yoruba girls dancing barefoot in the
Rain; it feels like the Gestapo
There is a light and warmth that beckons with words like
Memoir and futurist – they feed the poet’s soul
As if I have drawn a zero – a mouth opening and shutting
Slicing through the air where it should not be – interpret is as you will;
This abacus, this alphabet
How do children grow when they do not play is like asking
How do poets fill themselves up cognitively when their minds
Are a black, alluring habitat
Until glory is all yours
A small, loosed hunger giving you grief inside your belly
That not even a mad man can cure
Mine for the taking
She appeared before me as if she came on the wings of an angel
Nursing me back to health; she never let go – mother kind.
The end.
Stars that begin to fill the night sky
While we sleep, while we eat, while we dream in tides
Every night they make their tribal mark on civilisation
The yellow sunlight of the white sun has now dissolved
The din that suffocated us like a forest of trees is now
Thinned, walled in by rooms that are deathly quiet like
A mannequin’s paradise escape – the flurry of a tongue
On a belly; I can feel the heat of the wind floating on air
It’s not mournful at all; not like stories of the holocaust
Understanding the measure of loss of love is not easy
It simply takes possession over everything in your life
Left with a gold watch that could no longer tell time –
A staged, petrified memory in which there was no longer
Recognition of stealing touch and comfort out of routine
Silence has come and gone; suffered with the dark hours
I don’t know why I felt like nothing in your life – I cast
Words like stars into the night sky’s shadow; thrust them
Into predatory familiarity, the material of velocity, pieces
Of fecundity; imagery that we shared as sisters growing up
Speak, speak, speak now voyager, saboteur, even if your
Words come as an abortion of small nothings; with a splash of red
In slow motion; don’t hold anything back as you have done
For years: in war humanity behaves at its worst and you have
Done the same, I would only like to garner access to you –
To your private, imaginative world – I have loved you from
Afar for my whole life, alas, these cancer years sought a
Substitute, under stars laid attractions to spools, negatives
I trace your eyes, your wild hair; your teeth of pearls all in
One place with my fingertips self-consciously – they all say
‘Do not come too close’; up close you’re delicate, a flower
Whose blooms are not yet set in place – ripened by the sun?
Yet I feel you against my skin, after all aren’t we mirror
Images of each other born on the same day; years apart?
Here they come, here they come: salutary never haggard
These stellar posers; one by one not stentorian reminding
Me of your rounded figure built for comfort and not size
Tell me what you want to hear; a moveable feast of words?
The end.
The wounded pilgrim
When I was a child I was afraid
To speak to strangers; even then
I felt estranged from the human
Race, sought solace, a rare comfort
In books and in between the neutral
Spaces of the black letters of the
Alphabet that spread itself across
The pages I sought transition from
Childhood to puberty; a word I am
Still not very fond of; it meant growing
Up behind closed doors, shutting out
Dark voices; sensing there were no
Clouds with silver linings only
Cries of thunderstorms and lightning
Streaking across the sky in the night air
I was a good girl done badly by
Not as bad as some yet still locked
Inside a box with doll parts and the
Garden of a blank canvas perfumed
With the bright, still air of reality
Children can only be fragile warriors
But the canvas was uplifting and the words
Could all fit, musings, brick by brick?
The sun on its belly ripening even more
Poetry with keys, something absurdly
Supernatural in effect like the holier ark
Trailing behind the titan machine of my
Consciousness; sometimes the story
Begins at the end with no middle or
Beginning; sometimes not at all but it has
Educated me on so many things that blood
Is thicker than water and that families
Are not pulled out of the air for nothing
They exist to terrorise you, to bully you,
To grow you up into a worthy citizen or not
For the reasons that you think.
The end.
In response to Bride and Groom Lie Hidden for Three Days by Ted Hughes
Ritual
Michael’s ghost comes to me with the weight of water – I drink
In the lines of his face, blur the edges; bottle them up in memory for a
Keepsake of a perfect solidarity, stitch the laughter, the inner battle studies,
The bittersweet imprint of two bodies, star-crossed lovers, self-portraits that
Flower at the commitment of first time lover’s closeted togetherness
He has given me something; new eyes; shameless jewels, diamonds,
He scrounged about on the ground for his own in the rough;
Waited patiently until their gestation period came to an end,
He takes my own hand in his, I watch him like a spectator; his
Body is made of glass so I touch him tenderly as if he might break
You are the painted groom in the forest of the moonlight – you
Cover the mouths of dunes with your skin; there are no fences
Where you come from, there are no children here; there are
Golden rings on our fingers, wedding bands to mark the state of
Our unions to mend this focus purely – I needed you for awhile
This path, this door left ajar to remind myself of my swallowed up,
Rehearsed fear of being alone, a flock gave me hope, this furnace
Gave me the fear of being placed by an anchor, oh, joy, what is
This gift – I am choking on white, I let the angled beast in too soon
Black dogs as black as a river bark madly at the presence of wounded
Ghosts but they don’t keep me awake for long – I thought I wouldn’t
Know what do to with these stages of infancy that I have given birth to;
Baited with trailing, unnamed hooks; I pick at his birthmark, scratch it
With a nail as if it’s a tattoo, the plum of a bruise; I hit a wall, there are
Woods here – unburdened, finally loosed the weight I’ve carried
His clean, pale, bitten fingers are as remote from me as the light on sea glass
Or a wet, streaming tadpole; we are done with the night, I try not to dream
I can smell the scent of your ruffled, yellow hair like feathers on your pillow
I am in the minority now, I surfaced like winter, as wet as snow, as heavy
As the storm on the other side of the world, as weather; as if you didn’t know
My heart says love is intense; the heavenly shine of lust on the mind is brief
I watch you sleep – if I could slay your dragons, I would, I have numbers
For company, silence, a golden roost of mounting words sinking without
Feeling too much self-conscious, they burn, harvested on the bare, mute page
Those islands in neutral territory, if lust was not temporary then where
Would we all be; physically, humanity without alchemy – anonymous; I’ve arrived.
The end.
Friday, October 8, 2010
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Getting there: the gut symmetry of writing
Getting there: the gut symmetry of writing
What motivates me to write? It’s harder to explain to non-writers and easier in some ways to explain to writers who write for the sheer thrill of it, the madness clicking away inside your brain and the hell of it; to sweep away all the cobwebs out from underneath your psychic mind. In some cases writers sometimes miss the interior spaces that come in the neutral, empty nothingness between the words. Writing has created miracles in my life; it has created within me a deep sensitivity for the human condition, mushroomed insightfulness in the blackness of my depressions that is and will be forever linked to my imaginative, artistic and creative expressions. Without my depression I cannot write. I am left blinded; exiled from the distortions and the truthful meanings of words, a weakened, grasping and gasping fool, a terrifying puppet with a weathered resolved.
Piled up features with nowhere else to go
Writing ages me as I arrange the words on the page, mellows me like a fine wine as I slowly take cognisance of the fact of what I am committing to the page , it smells of the scent of freshly washed, limp hair, something novel and benign, linen airing in a cupboard lined with peeling old-fashioned wallpaper left over from an odd job of doing a wall years or months before. Writing reminds me of my mother’s rose garden in full crimson bloom (the one that she meditates on early in the morning), her perfumed wrists, her perfumed lobes behind her ears, it pulls and pushes words gently and then forcefully against my mind like oars in water, makes me crawl like a vulnerable baby, makes my words walk stooped like an elderly man leaning on a cane who has frail and delicate bones. It spooks me sometimes; jerks me into tidal daydreaming, when pain or hurt moves within me leaving me to lick my wounds so does inspiration in small doses or a heavy weight. Inspiration for me has always been the definition of a miracle.
The education of the mind
Writing is my calling. It has taken me over twenty years to discover that. For years I considered it a secret. Words would rush out like blisters out of my pen. I won prizes for it at school. I had imagination. I was imaginative and sensitive. I was going to be an investigative journalist or a documentary filmmaker. But God infinitely takes those decisions out of your hands, chooses your pathways; your final destination. It carried me through tumultuous times; changing schools, built character, boxed my creativity within me until such a time came when I could put it to good use and colour invisible boundaries around me to protect my mad heroines and protagonists, my adolescent moodiness. I alternated unnervingly emotional maturity, alchemy, humanity and purity. For this I have to seek inspiration everywhere. For all the parts, egos, identity crisis’s, cogs and wheels of the machine to work I have to rely not only on pen and paper but also on hope, education, beauty and then setting everything to self-destruct so that only a blot of that remains that I can knit at, peep at, peek at, address, disguise and dismantle. I knit all these blots together and make them into features that heal, features that magnify the audacity, the intensity of the circle of life that has to be, most of all, endured. Something changes when we grow older as writers. We overcome storms. We learn breathing lessons.
The fate of the writer
The denial of suffering for your craft comes easily to some writers; not to all. There are times when I feel like every word I write is the last one that will come to mind. It scares the hell out of me. First, where do all of them, these words, come from (this always amazes me), some kind of wish factory from heaven? Will they eventually die out, become extinct; aside from behaving like gorillas in the mist at first to capture your attention even in a dark, hellish mood? Or will they vanish without a trace into a shimmering haze from where I first beckoned them from like a heat wave. Sometimes the world is a blur. There is no filter from your head to your mouth and the messages that your brain is sending to your memory box is so frequent and excessive that you forget jewels of thought and pearls, gems of wisdom. Words when they’re estranged from you (this is called writer’s block) always set up a challenge for the writer. Have I lost it now completely? You grow older in years but the words that spring from you are always in their infancy stages. You always have great expectations for them.
There are pieces of writing that pierce hearts, pieces that charge the air with electricity, pieces that leave readers in tears, wanting more, having their cake and eating it too. Pieces of writing that pierce the heart, leaving the writer breathless, leave the reader breathless too. If you’re moody, that usually rubs off on the characters as well and the reader can sense that. Never hesitate to write when you’re depressed. Some of your best work although it can be suggestive of what you were feeling at the time should well just be left alone to stand on its own ground and speak for itself. Don’t explain too much or you’ll give it all away and then where is the sense in that. Writers’ birth words, give words life, give them air to breathe, mouthfuls of it and give them a splash of colour to rejuvenate them in a sense of a wonderland. They’re not written on the body in tattoos for nothing. We are all hungry for words and for knowledge and for the gifts that come from them.
Eyes of gods
In words, in language, in meaning and their purpose we can see the eyes of gods. Some are Buddha-like, sturdy, built like brick walls. There are others like me out there who see words as meat, living out their dreams writing haiku and poetry until it completely sates their thirst like moths attracted to light bulbs, getting into the spirit of it all of being a little known writer, while having a normal day job that pays the bills. The empty shell of a writer is one that attracts eternal insomnia, fighting off sleep, madness, depression, mental illness, psychologists, chaos, disorder across a desk and leaves room for little else some might say but the shell also retains the order of families, progeny, small children growing up with vocabularies of children much older than they are; writing and words come with a love even of just hearing the wonderful words of herbal teas like chamomile that your psychiatrist drinks during her breaks from seeing her patients, chai tea from India that your sister brought home from her vacation there or an infusion of green tea or a flask of coffee. It leaves you with a hunger, no, a craving for seeing your name out there as if it was a completely different entity than you and what you created out of nothing; simply words.
This personal essay on writing was published on Ovi: Finland's English Online Magazine on the 7 of October 2010. Professor Emanuel Paparella commented on it and said as follows at 11:29:42.
Indeed, "in the beginning was the Word..." and the Word came into the world and the world knew it not... Some philosophers (one thinks of Aristotle and Aquinas and Spinoza) have reasoned to God and made Her into their own image: a thinking being who thinks his own thoughts eternally...I think that is only half the truth. God more than a philosopher is a poet. The whole universe is a poem. Not to recognize that (as Mario the illiterare is able to do in that gem of a movie "Il Postino') is to become an idolater and a narcisist who worships the thoughts of one's mind and thinks that behind words there is thought, when the contrary applies: behind thought there are images adn words. The living God is beyond reason and logic. She is not a logician and a chess player; is a dancing poet and most writers who need to write to survive intuite that much even when they cannot explain it philosophically.
What motivates me to write? It’s harder to explain to non-writers and easier in some ways to explain to writers who write for the sheer thrill of it, the madness clicking away inside your brain and the hell of it; to sweep away all the cobwebs out from underneath your psychic mind. In some cases writers sometimes miss the interior spaces that come in the neutral, empty nothingness between the words. Writing has created miracles in my life; it has created within me a deep sensitivity for the human condition, mushroomed insightfulness in the blackness of my depressions that is and will be forever linked to my imaginative, artistic and creative expressions. Without my depression I cannot write. I am left blinded; exiled from the distortions and the truthful meanings of words, a weakened, grasping and gasping fool, a terrifying puppet with a weathered resolved.
Piled up features with nowhere else to go
Writing ages me as I arrange the words on the page, mellows me like a fine wine as I slowly take cognisance of the fact of what I am committing to the page , it smells of the scent of freshly washed, limp hair, something novel and benign, linen airing in a cupboard lined with peeling old-fashioned wallpaper left over from an odd job of doing a wall years or months before. Writing reminds me of my mother’s rose garden in full crimson bloom (the one that she meditates on early in the morning), her perfumed wrists, her perfumed lobes behind her ears, it pulls and pushes words gently and then forcefully against my mind like oars in water, makes me crawl like a vulnerable baby, makes my words walk stooped like an elderly man leaning on a cane who has frail and delicate bones. It spooks me sometimes; jerks me into tidal daydreaming, when pain or hurt moves within me leaving me to lick my wounds so does inspiration in small doses or a heavy weight. Inspiration for me has always been the definition of a miracle.
The education of the mind
Writing is my calling. It has taken me over twenty years to discover that. For years I considered it a secret. Words would rush out like blisters out of my pen. I won prizes for it at school. I had imagination. I was imaginative and sensitive. I was going to be an investigative journalist or a documentary filmmaker. But God infinitely takes those decisions out of your hands, chooses your pathways; your final destination. It carried me through tumultuous times; changing schools, built character, boxed my creativity within me until such a time came when I could put it to good use and colour invisible boundaries around me to protect my mad heroines and protagonists, my adolescent moodiness. I alternated unnervingly emotional maturity, alchemy, humanity and purity. For this I have to seek inspiration everywhere. For all the parts, egos, identity crisis’s, cogs and wheels of the machine to work I have to rely not only on pen and paper but also on hope, education, beauty and then setting everything to self-destruct so that only a blot of that remains that I can knit at, peep at, peek at, address, disguise and dismantle. I knit all these blots together and make them into features that heal, features that magnify the audacity, the intensity of the circle of life that has to be, most of all, endured. Something changes when we grow older as writers. We overcome storms. We learn breathing lessons.
The fate of the writer
The denial of suffering for your craft comes easily to some writers; not to all. There are times when I feel like every word I write is the last one that will come to mind. It scares the hell out of me. First, where do all of them, these words, come from (this always amazes me), some kind of wish factory from heaven? Will they eventually die out, become extinct; aside from behaving like gorillas in the mist at first to capture your attention even in a dark, hellish mood? Or will they vanish without a trace into a shimmering haze from where I first beckoned them from like a heat wave. Sometimes the world is a blur. There is no filter from your head to your mouth and the messages that your brain is sending to your memory box is so frequent and excessive that you forget jewels of thought and pearls, gems of wisdom. Words when they’re estranged from you (this is called writer’s block) always set up a challenge for the writer. Have I lost it now completely? You grow older in years but the words that spring from you are always in their infancy stages. You always have great expectations for them.
There are pieces of writing that pierce hearts, pieces that charge the air with electricity, pieces that leave readers in tears, wanting more, having their cake and eating it too. Pieces of writing that pierce the heart, leaving the writer breathless, leave the reader breathless too. If you’re moody, that usually rubs off on the characters as well and the reader can sense that. Never hesitate to write when you’re depressed. Some of your best work although it can be suggestive of what you were feeling at the time should well just be left alone to stand on its own ground and speak for itself. Don’t explain too much or you’ll give it all away and then where is the sense in that. Writers’ birth words, give words life, give them air to breathe, mouthfuls of it and give them a splash of colour to rejuvenate them in a sense of a wonderland. They’re not written on the body in tattoos for nothing. We are all hungry for words and for knowledge and for the gifts that come from them.
Eyes of gods
In words, in language, in meaning and their purpose we can see the eyes of gods. Some are Buddha-like, sturdy, built like brick walls. There are others like me out there who see words as meat, living out their dreams writing haiku and poetry until it completely sates their thirst like moths attracted to light bulbs, getting into the spirit of it all of being a little known writer, while having a normal day job that pays the bills. The empty shell of a writer is one that attracts eternal insomnia, fighting off sleep, madness, depression, mental illness, psychologists, chaos, disorder across a desk and leaves room for little else some might say but the shell also retains the order of families, progeny, small children growing up with vocabularies of children much older than they are; writing and words come with a love even of just hearing the wonderful words of herbal teas like chamomile that your psychiatrist drinks during her breaks from seeing her patients, chai tea from India that your sister brought home from her vacation there or an infusion of green tea or a flask of coffee. It leaves you with a hunger, no, a craving for seeing your name out there as if it was a completely different entity than you and what you created out of nothing; simply words.
This personal essay on writing was published on Ovi: Finland's English Online Magazine on the 7 of October 2010. Professor Emanuel Paparella commented on it and said as follows at 11:29:42.
Indeed, "in the beginning was the Word..." and the Word came into the world and the world knew it not... Some philosophers (one thinks of Aristotle and Aquinas and Spinoza) have reasoned to God and made Her into their own image: a thinking being who thinks his own thoughts eternally...I think that is only half the truth. God more than a philosopher is a poet. The whole universe is a poem. Not to recognize that (as Mario the illiterare is able to do in that gem of a movie "Il Postino') is to become an idolater and a narcisist who worships the thoughts of one's mind and thinks that behind words there is thought, when the contrary applies: behind thought there are images adn words. The living God is beyond reason and logic. She is not a logician and a chess player; is a dancing poet and most writers who need to write to survive intuite that much even when they cannot explain it philosophically.
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