An evening blog today — these always feel a little strange, a little like cheating: writing at night? Who gets to do that?
A great group of writers today at Writing the Flood — I feel so fortunate to get to do this work! For today’s post, I’m sharing a write from today:
Splinter, tangle, seraphim, rage, strongthrom, wanting, abash, egalitarian, terraform, thrombosis, trombone, Rorschach, warpath, sever, spittle, single, hiss, salivate, captcha, chanter, telegraph, some days this is all I have, these words, this repetition, the joy that comes with framing and forming the syllables, making my mouth work, I forget how my mouth worked. Laughter, ostentation, cellophane, transom, calabash, septuagenarian, strongarm, there’s something living under the words, under and inside the angle of jawbone and tongue, something wanting a formation of its own. I sit inside nomenclature and rigamarole and want something different, a word with that structure but other letters, a word unlike molestation but with that flavor, a word that rolls like sanctimonious but reads more like empty. How to find these words. How to trust them. the old practice was to sit down with pen and notebook and brimming coffee cup and open hours and write it all out, thick and messy and endless and wet, until what was burning too tender for words under the surfaces of language could peek its way out between the letters. I don’t write that way anymore, no time, gotta get it done, gotta get to work. This is one of those stories.
Sycamore, tangle, parade, artichoke, tongue, splinter. This isn’t like that. This isn’t an empty time. This isn’t about blossoming. If you’re waiting for me to tell you something, you might wait a long time, but you sit there, hands folded, face fading and consecrated, looking into the too much darkness underneath my face and calling a time out. The carpet is industrial grey berber and we stain the bottoms of our shoes with its messages of factory and industry. The walls carry blankness into too much of the future. The other workers here are holding their own conference calls, they say things like, dominance effect and standard of deviance (no, that’s deviation) and what was your n for that study? and then they laugh like there’s a lightness in these conversations that happen inside bland rooms with glass doors and blond wood frames. In my own cube, I’m silent, headphones pumping the dance music I use to try and wake up the neurons. So much grey carpeting, even on the walls. The hum of electronics. The researcher in the next cube responds to her pager, yells into the phone. I wonder how I fit into this education-industrial-complex. My head goes hazy with flattened conversations: hey, how was your weekend? I know, hump day, right? I forget my favorite words: sesquipedalian, gorse, puerile, tacit, calibrate, tether, soma, dendrite, tendon, canker, weep.
Be easy with you this weekend. Say something you love to say.
