Thursday 18 August 2011

I'm not a writer

I do not know how to write. I do now understand the concepts and
the themes; words are just shapes
pressed together in an attempt to say
what my tongue cannot and the
phrases are already so clogged in my
throat that i am a champagne bottle with all the fizz and none of the pleasure. ink
stains and pencil smears
and typewriters break so that i am left
with nothing but ripped shards of paper
falling around my elbows and piling
around my feet in an attempt to sculpt meaning out of the absence of what i
was meant to fill. You see, writers know the way to
phrase and they know the brush they
have in their hand. it is careful and
planned and the art is in the crafting
and the hours of sweat that is put into
every syllable. it is a labor of love and loving labor and when the final
punctuation is added, there is not a
comma or curvature of letter that has
not been pampered and ushered into
final resting place. I, however, do not know how to write. No, instead i know how to spit up
memories and emotions until they are
spilled on the paper and bleeding
through the novel's back cover. you
see, i am nothing but a hurricane; i am
tearing off the roofs of the houses in my imagination to see how the final product
will look when smeared across the sky. i
am clicking open my chest a rib at a
time, dipping my fingers into the
canyons and letting the excess drip over
the ground; look and tell me what you see. stare and show me what it means
to you. I am not careful - my words are
neglected and abused. my works are
never final, but are rather bruised and
aching and always ready to be shoved
into the corner for the latest mess to be
placed on center stage. they are not polished and if you try to hold them,
you will only cut your fingertips in the
process. they are sharp and jagged and
living entities that bite those that get to
close. they aren't meant to be
examined, rather only experienced and when the fading howls have subsided,
you are meant to only think about the
way your pulse looped faster or the way
the incoherent made your thoughts spin
and swirl and fade together like the final
thunderclap over the distant ridge. I am not a writer; i am an assassin armed
with words. i am a natural disaster
rooted in phrases. my broadsword drips
ink and my incisors are ripping into the
jugular of thoughts. i kill with sentences
and disarm with paragraphs. i fire verses that i call poetry like machine gun fire
from between my teeth and hope that
somewhere within the bullet spray that i
struck a nerve. that perhaps in the
slashing of the blade that i am able to
cut some sense into the nonsense pooling from my tongue and onto the
paper so that i can rearrange these
sounds and convince the unbelieving that
i am indeed a writer.

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