xviii

There's nothing to writing.  All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”

                                                                                                 -Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith
           
           Besides this series of  broken, self-indulgent prose, I haven’t actually written anything in a good two months, no lines of verse or spotty visits to the red-bound thesaurus from my mother’s college days. I don’t know why the words aren’t coming out in staggered stanza and erratically spaced adjectival wordage, but they aren’t.

Every night I force myself to sit at this unnatural backlit keyboard and type digital nothings into the blind of midnight. And, every night I look into myself for free verse and rhythm, trying to explain the world around me, trying to put the day’s phone calls, instant messages, and texts into the one medium I can understand. But no poetry will come out of the vein.

I used to write poetry all the time. I used to write poetry on empty Friday nights. I used to write poetry in the underbelly of my fake-mahagoney desk during Calculus. But now I do not.

For instance, I wrote a poem a year ago, hastily scribbled in the black barked binder that I keep hidden under my bed. It was bad, unemotional, unflinchingly unnatural, about an isolated incident.

But then I added the personal. I added the personal tonight and the iambic spark returned. The personal.

Old Movie

I used to imagine curling up with the girl that I could never really get,

the dimmed lights of the room framing a refuge from the scorching, scratching nails of summer and

we would sit in the cool brick room, hands grasping for each other in the dark, transformed by the shining dodges betweens the cracks in the film,

its swirling specters dustily dancing out of the screen and into our laps,

flickering and swaying to the grains of the soundtrack,

humming along with us and the television.

And all would be right with our black-and-white world

for just two lounging hours.

The personal. The personal is coming back, one line, one stanza at a time.