Lately I've had this difficulty that isn't so much writer's block as it is restlessness. I want to sum it up by saying that I skipped a lot of school as a teenager, but that won't make much sense to you.
I am a notorious skipper. I've skipped schools, court dates, weddings, birthday parties, on and on. I sometimes wonder if I get myself involved in things simply to skip them, to feel that guilty liberation, that sweet ruin of doing something you'll have to pay for. Now I think I'm trying to skip poetry. The poem sits there half done, nascent, an idea waiting for a beginning and a direction. I have an end, I have names and actions and scents and sights, and now I just need a starting point and a little time to wend my way through the words. The poem looks up at me saying, "It's time," and I look away and think about beaches, women, long sordid and wonderful imaginings.
The way this is supposed to work is: I wrestle the idea until I have it by the scruff of the neck, and then I extract a blessing. At the moment: the idea has me pinned, and I'm thinking I should have just gone to culinary school.
I love to cook. I love food the way I love sex -- with my whole body, in a manner so consuming that I feel it as a pressure against every inch of my skin, a warm and palpable sweetness. I should have just been one of those grumpy coke-snorting cooks who acts sane long enough to schmooze the patrons and spends the rest of his time throwing shit around and cursing in French.
There I go again, avoiding the poem. The poem isn't a child, it isn't a pet, and it isn't even a monster or an angelic thing. The poem is a person, just another pedestrian face that happens to show up at your door one night with something to say. When you're lucky, it speaks your language -- you stand there and absorb all this terrible wonder. But most of the time it's foreign, speaking in a tongue that moves you and drives you, but that you don't quite understand.
I am a notorious skipper. I've skipped schools, court dates, weddings, birthday parties, on and on. I sometimes wonder if I get myself involved in things simply to skip them, to feel that guilty liberation, that sweet ruin of doing something you'll have to pay for. Now I think I'm trying to skip poetry. The poem sits there half done, nascent, an idea waiting for a beginning and a direction. I have an end, I have names and actions and scents and sights, and now I just need a starting point and a little time to wend my way through the words. The poem looks up at me saying, "It's time," and I look away and think about beaches, women, long sordid and wonderful imaginings.
The way this is supposed to work is: I wrestle the idea until I have it by the scruff of the neck, and then I extract a blessing. At the moment: the idea has me pinned, and I'm thinking I should have just gone to culinary school.
I love to cook. I love food the way I love sex -- with my whole body, in a manner so consuming that I feel it as a pressure against every inch of my skin, a warm and palpable sweetness. I should have just been one of those grumpy coke-snorting cooks who acts sane long enough to schmooze the patrons and spends the rest of his time throwing shit around and cursing in French.
There I go again, avoiding the poem. The poem isn't a child, it isn't a pet, and it isn't even a monster or an angelic thing. The poem is a person, just another pedestrian face that happens to show up at your door one night with something to say. When you're lucky, it speaks your language -- you stand there and absorb all this terrible wonder. But most of the time it's foreign, speaking in a tongue that moves you and drives you, but that you don't quite understand.