Why Do I Write?
I know all too intimately the impermanence of human intellect
What I know and think today
Will be unrecognizable from my thoughts and feelings of tomorrow
And I have yet to encounter a day that did not shimmer &
Shiver with its own distinct divinity.
Some awe-ful. Some awful.
I write to sustain my commitments to living as a writer and an artist.
Knowing my thoughts might be memorialized keeps me attentive & actualized
I am part of something greater.
In conversation with the canon and percolating my own portfolio
Each memory playing out in front of me undecipherable & unobtainable.
I mean to make something metamorphic.
A loam of live biome
Composed of composted composites.
Compiled, compressed, and collapsed into interpretation &
The great humanitarian hubris of describing art as ‘sharing oneself’
As if I have the power to make my unknowable known to you, and better yet,
I expect you to get something out of that.
How does my soul sound?
Does it have a nice rhythm at least?
How much of God’s creation must I modify to stay on tempo?
How’s my mouthfeel?
Too much depth of flavor, too little?
I write so I know my own recipes to success.
I write to hear me out from past pits of despair,
Looking from the outside with no more the answer of
Quick rescue from pain than I had then.
I write to learn the True Patience
Of Time
My poem from today sits pages away from my first Patti Smith poem
Back before I dated the pages with a year
Unable to conceptualize of a time so lengthy
It extended past me in units greater than months.
When the notebook closes, those pages are closer together than I am
To any living person.
They will grow to know each other intimately,
As good stewards of the neighborhood must do.
I write so I have neighbors to return to.
Kitchen tables that feel familiar & stories I’ve heard so many times
I can finally listen to them
I write so that finishing something doesn’t even pretend it has to be over.
I write to reassure myself that this is all just a first draft
And there never has to be a final draft.
I write because I don’t admire the people who got published.
I admire the people who lived it.