When I Write

I have this little notebook next to my pillow.

It’s not really a notebook though—

its pages are clean, white, and even because it’s actually a mini sketchbook.

I would like to think no lines means that I am

a Free-Spirit-Who-Refuses-To-Be-Constrained-By-Prison-Bars,

but really the blankness probably signifies the infinite system of lack that I enter into, When I write.

Most of the time it goes like this:

It’s midnight and I can’t sleep

because I am re-enacting failed conversations and confrontations in my head,

always getting stuck in the same places. I leap from my bed

and search frantically for a pen, which has fallen

somewhere in the monster filled recesses between the wall and the mattress.

I scribble across the page like a demon possessed

and wake up to find that these midnight scrawlings are often too illegible to read.

But a lot of the time it goes like this:

I am in class (diligently keeping my focus on the teacher and the task at hand)

when the Muse descends upon me (trumpets are probably playing in the background)

and I am compelled to write down something that doesn’t make any sense to me at the time.

i.e.: “If you ever cared to open up her bible you would find an entire garden,

years and years worth of gardens,

pressed there, held there, suspended” (Foundations in Religion and Philosophy, Prof. M. Lepain).

But I come back to it later and it has grown in my absence, blossomed into something new

or, more likely, I have changed and see it through a new perspective.

Sometimes:

Sometimes there is that Thing.

I feel its claws begin to enter the flesh, it is inside me and it wants to get out it it’s ripping it’s tearing

it’s cleaving me in two it won’t stop it won’t ever stop the

Thing

is screaming now it wants to use my mouth but I can’t I can’t ever let it out

but why?

Sometimes I write to immolate that which haunts me.

And then:

I also have this little notebook that does have neat little evenly spaced bars,

dividing the page longitudinally.

They guide my pencil, parallel strips of light delineating the airplane’s runway.

In the spiral of this notebook is a pencil- this is so that it does not get lost.

I guess you could call it a prayer journal

always written in cursive

because in cursive you can see the flowing beauty of the written word,

how it changes to another if you look quickly enough.

It is like a whole new language.

It is different than the ink I boldly place on blank pages, so in your face and raw.

Penciled cursive is humbly beautiful.

Always:

When I write I walk a tight rope.

I must carefully balance the little control I have over these words which define my life

and my need to control them.

I can never be naive enough think that these words are my own

or that I write to or for someone, even myself.

When I write, it is because I have no other choice.