Whispers

    follow me on Twitter

    26.5.09

    Write About Everything

    The best advice that need never have been given.  I can look back on times when, by some device, I felt free enough just to write.  To write and write and write in something I shouldn't venture to call "stream of consciousness," and really, I should say, to type, not to write, though what is that but semantics?  I write with a pen and paper, I type with a keyboard and a liquid crystal display, but I've written, no matter, haven't I?  Wind-whipped nights with nothing but gallons of ink and hot brown earth, warm summer evenings with noise all around me, drowned by the thoughts in my head.  Writing for me is such an experience, such an act, because of how intimate it is.  For those lucky of us (I must say this as there are plenty of us in this world whose sight, hearing, voice, or much worse have abandoned them, and to them I cannot relate, no matter how I try.)  Perhaps were I to go blind, a wonderful speaker would I be.  Deaf, an artist.  All in all, again, lucky am I, a novelist.  No, I have committed no long stories to any bound volumes.  I have only scarcely given birth to a character in a story, a ship on a voyage, a planet among the stars in my head.  Yet I have penned many a letter, published many a blog entry, posted, in years of yore, many an entry in my LiveJournal.  Many have been (un?)lucky enough to sift through my words; what some find littered with fluff, others find easy on the eyes and (sometimes) easier on the soul.  You are (un?)lucky enough to find yourself now in a place where there is nothing else to do but just that.

    This I would like to call, "What I Enjoy"

    As myriad sounds
    roll into my head and back out into the ether like waves,
    those sounds you can't quite place, that fade, just as waves, if you let them,
    those sounds which surround the silence and
    choke it to death,
    I sip my tea.

    Unsweetened.
    A sensation, a tightness, a lightness, a spice
    in the back of my throat, having downed a glass.
    It reminds me that I drank tea,
    that I have a throat,
    that my mind is working,
    that I have a mind,
    that my mind is working.

    When you stop and let yourself realize it
    you rediscover sensation.
    Carpet on the sole of your foot,
    plastic underneath your finger tips,
    a dull cut in your leg as the weight of your thigh rests upon the corner of a keyboard tray.
    Is this pain?  Are a million, billion cells
    crying out in agony?

    Why won't I spare them?
    I uncross my legs, and the voices are silenced.
    I swallow, and the world around me is made new.
    I blink, and the world around me is made new again.

    When my heart beats, is the world around me made new
    again?
    Or am I?



    1 comment:

    Christina said...

    I've always wondered if I write "better" with pen & paper, or with computer -- it always seems like I put out more with a computer, but I'm not sure I can really compare the two (aside from them both being writing). Each thing that comes out of my fingers in one way or another is an expression of self, and it's different each time.

    Having said that, I love the poem. Your imagery is good, and evokes the sensations you've described. I almost felt the tea, the carpet, and the plastic.

    I love it!