5/29/04 02:11 pm
Words aren't coming as well as they once did. I still remember a time when they poured out of me, good as milk or bad as bleach and I could purge myself without editing, or with very little. Now I'm a little obsessive about editing. A recent poem I've tried to write, I have written three or four drafts of despite that I previously believed in the purity of just one draft, corrected for spelling and grammar.
I realize it's a mind-fuck to write about writing, and try to make good writing about bad or nonexistent writing. I have to write about something, though, and the old themes of dysfunction and illness and anger are stale. Newer pains and memories are still too fresh, too pungent and complicated for me to begin to chisel out of their wilderness right now. Writing about Chris, for example, I tried to soon after "it happened," but it was plain and had no meat, was all dry bread. Or worse, a bombardment of confused and tangled images in a strangely static, but simultaneously frenetic heap - all I wanted to say, all the sounds I wanted to make to match the hurt and the shock and the guilt and the awful, awful jealousy, all of it bunched, a bulging and massive knot.
I guess what I mean to say is that I want words to come bubbling and hissing - the way hydrogen peroxide bubbles and hisses on a fresh wound, both the visceral beauty of pop-fizz, the delight of it, as well as the school-book specific, chemical understanding - catalase, reaction, hydrogen and oxygen and blood cells. I want scalpel words and woodblock words, I want any words that go strangely, elementally together - the metal, the wood, the earth and the water. I do believe that, unmedicated, I am less able to effectively express myself or make sense of extremes of experience. Without pills, rather than feeling unleashed and finely tuned as catgut strung tight, I feel dull and thick, clogged and clotted and unable to access the "right" word or sentence, metaphor or simile or sometimes even adjective. Words like a hairball at my feet, senseless and ugly and undigested.
Despite the lack of success, still lurks the urge, the inability to NOT want to rhapsodize on a moment sitting at the corner of the public library, the dozen protesters across the street, the tourists gawking, the man laying, a few yards away, under the scratchy but warmn grey wool blankets of the same type my father used to steal when restocking the ambulance. The meaning of all this, an object, a stranger, a pitiful and grungy bearded man on the Common burning my hand with a mock-chivalrous whiskey kiss all the while desiring to fuck me; somehow related with my nearly irrepressible urge to climb out onto the girders like geometric branches sprouting from under the overpass near the end of Newbury St., the Hynes Convetion Center/ICA stop on the green line, over the cars rushing and the sunshine slanting through the old, the new architecture, the curved fence designed to curb such impulses as mine.
Even this, now, this typing I feel is skewed, failing to express or relating just the barest hint of the color and the vibrancy and the tinge of deadly sorrow, violent anger and the past, the present, the future, the stories, the thousands and millions and my fascination with it all, all, all, too confusing whirled and mashed and intense.
I want too much. When I get a stack of books at the library, I want to read them simultaneously, even yet, to have them read - I am impatient for it all and I need a flood, though that is what can sometimes paralyze me - a flood of information, feeling, words, sound, sight - all at once, inundating me so that my lungs fill with all the unutterable agony of absolutely everything. All I want is everything, everyone, all I want is the whole fucking world, the galaxy, the universe. Is that so much to ask?