The Prose-Iguana
Let language leave you but awhile and tend to the family you left behind.
«To forsake the world is easy; the world with them in it… does make me hesitate»
To write because someone told you to, to chase after a story like a character in a plot? To write in spite of every convenience not to, to document rather than live?
«To write for the sake of a turn of phrase, a description draws me out: in a ward sectioned off, I miss the moonlight and nobody visits; no one left to ask if this is voluntary or not, or at which point the itch became a scratch»
Mean something to mean something and it goes away. The underpinning meaning of a winter backed up when meaning was piecemeal in every exchange.
«One combination of words for another, my poetry for your prose. Stuck in a fizzy-flat cola with nothing left to do but resolve or dissolve»
A matter of dying, a longing for immortality?
«Fear of the smooth granite, yes. A puny, selfish tic, down deep, despite all of the rhetoric that comes with being a character, I, too, hunger to be a ghost»
And what is stopping you? Why the iguana on your page?
«Substance abuse, too much substance. I gotta get clean in a dirty way. The water is warm and the cool air dissuades me from leaving. Inertia is closer. If I rise, I rise naked, and walk barefoot along the stony path of righteousness»
You are confusing poetry with reality like the Escher hand that draws itself. Pleasure has a cap that whispers “this alone satisfies”, whether voyeur or participant, and any line so crossed in the mind is emptied in the experience. There is no need to reproach the embryonic drift of pleasure, let the canker-sore of your good intentions heal, and fast, find someone to kiss.
«Pleasure is secondary, an additive. I want to break into the wards of tomorrow. The passing pleasure of something left over, even if it is just fantasy»
He who lives for tomorrow, dies today.
«Every choice starves off something»
To live for a make-believe tomorrow. The picnic table playwright, once a week, over the last summer of high school - the play never finished.
«Aged wrong, given everything all of the time, generations deep and distant from our selves, what else but this headache of fullness?»
Hemingway said a writer ought to be hungry.
«He was drunk»
You are full of words and yet you hesitate to write.
«Not every choice is mine alone (the canker-sore). Better to fork, like Borges’ story, and live in both the hermitage and the sunny day. The choice unmade, I waver between realities, the stowaway of today and the captive of tomorrow. A desire to write my own prose, my own epitaph»
Better the dream than the reality. To die a writer in your wrists so as to never know the measure of your talent.
«To starve off all talk of measures and talent, dreams and reality - they are ulcerous by intent. Goad with every word, sentence, paragraph an answer to the call: life is to be drunk, unstop the voice inside you and draw out the spirits that keep your carcass warm»
