on-being-a-rat

Split your skull__ hatchet works well enough. Take a more delicate instrument__ scalpel, perhaps__nd make a hand-sized slit; it doesn__ matter where. Reach in (no glove needed), plunge down to the very bottom, pinch the inside layer of membrane and yank, hard. If it feels like you__e just turned your brain inside out, you have. Writing is brain surgery, pure and simple.

I suck the words word-dryto me, assimilated orderly at breakeye speedstill hard and hardersofter thenline-lined book-dry__il not a dropof water-bloodfrom oak and elmand authored menis left to whisper__ead_

I__e had a fountain pen surgically implanted in my left index finger to save trouble. My body is tattooed with line upon line of truth, fiction, and a not-always-pleasing mix of the two.

When I pour a bowl of Uncle Sam__ cereal, I never know if I should stand when I eat, salute it first, or simply hum the Star Spangled Banner between mouthfuls.

This piece of earth I billet grows small. Bullets of time dart past, dropping shards of opportunity at my feet. And until the rift that surrounds my decaying body clamps shut__wallows me up like so many remains__ army on, simultaneously ignoring and saving my comrades in the hole.Such is a writer__ life.

When reading a book, one hopes it doesn__ turn into a painful process. Predictable is bad enough. Laborious is acceptable if the labor produces fruit. But with painfully bad writing, all one can do is grab a hatchet, slice off its head, and bury it.

The setting sun threatened to consume me__t could have, you know. It would have been a beautiful death with an honorable eulogy: slain by a magnificent slice of piercing orange energy. I simply turned and walked away; I would live another day.

PLEASE TELL ME YOU KNOW OF SYLVIA PLATHConventions bleed my soulsqueeze me oldwear me grey like a headstone in transit.It__ tradition and form__ear of the unknown__riving me deadin tight spaces darkly.I cry aloudbut who can hearwhen I stand alonein the middle of an art show_.

I don__ need to write. Madness or suicide are other options, though not nearly as compelling. But I want to create; I hope to create worlds in my own image, admittedly a self-centered plan. I want others to understand me better, pay more attention to me, like or love me for who I am. Maybe that__ it. Or maybe I should simply learn to say, __et__ have lunch.

Writing is making love under a crescent moon: I see shadows of what__ to come, and it__ enough; I have faith in what I can__ see and it__ substantiated by a beginning, a climax, an ending. And if it__ an epic novel in hand, I watch the sunrise amid the twigs and dewing grass; the wordplay is what matters.Simply put, I__ in love, and any inconvenience is merely an afterthought.The sun tips the horizon; the manuscript is complete. The author, full of profound exhaustion, lays his stylus aside. His labor of love stretches before him, beautiful, content, sleeping, until the next crescent moon stars the evening sky.

If a book can save__edeem us from the mediocrity of the mundane__urely, there must be a God.

I read a book, am vortexed in with no escape; my face contorts, eyelids frost, breath comes short, body longs, heart stop-starts. Who__ to say too much won__ kill me? Who__ to say I care?

The Page awaits the Inspiration even as Inspiration roams the world of man, seeking a Page upon which to unfurl itself, body and soul, bare yet clothed in immortality if not immediacy.And the gods said, __et there be a Page, and many a Page,_ and there was a Book. And we saw that the Book was good.

Oh God, for a few who will love me in tiny ways every single day of my flashing existence. For a mere one or two who will treat me like the trash I am, who will love the smell of garbage and rummage through the bin of my failings to find the wrapped cheeseburger they can do without but consider long enough to get their taste buds used to the idea. Oh for a melodious tongue to sing me a song about french fries.

Writing is a beast to tame, an energy to transform. Whip that toad into a prince and French kiss it to life. We start at the top but keep looking down, from macro to micro, from what could work to what does__ut start with the dream. Nothing is real apart from the clouds, and all clouds pass with life in their wake__ome rain thoughts.

Writing makes me hard, like a fisherman, and brown from the heat. Tossing out and reeling in is a job for visionaries and those with calloused hands.

Today I fed him right off the bat, and only checked Facebook twice.