Skip to main content

Lately, during my designated “writing time,” I find myself shuffling around the house in my slippers and rearranging piles of cooking magazines and lengthy utility bills. I take out the recycling and I brush the dog and I shake out the rugs and I think of all the things I could be doing if I wasn’t supposed to be writing – which I’m really not doing. Today, I shuffled back to my desk and dug through a pile of my favorite poetry books and I realized that if I didn’t write then maybe I wouldn’t notice the subtle pulse in what I read. I wouldn’t stop when I came across lines like “I want to womanize the Bible, rend it, render it homey, homemade, I lust to cut-and-paste” and I wouldn’t hold my breath at “The radio aches a little tune that tells the story of what the night is thinking. It’s thinking of love. It’s thinking of stabbing us to death and leaving our bodies in a dumpster. That’s a nice touch, stains in the night, whiskey and kisses for everyone.” If I didn’t write anymore then maybe I wouldn’t wake late at night and race through the house for a pencil to scratch into my notebook “She came like an opera, all white and burning. The moment opened wide and she came, tumbling, a fierce shift in the back of the throat, a bite in the meat of your own tongue” and I wouldn’t realize when I drifted back to sleep that it doesn’t matter who she is or where she is coming from; it only matters that she came at all and that I woke, burning to tell someone about it.