You want to be a writer. You have to have something to say. Sometimes there's nothing.
I get random flashes. Sentence fragments in photographic clarity. A form of psychic channelling, I suppose. It comes from outside.
No one asked Hemingway where he got his ideas from. Everyone figured it was the war and elephant hunting. Sure, those things busted holes in the walls. What came through, even he wasn't expecting.
There are no polar bears in Antarctica.
If you were me you'd have that in your head, a meaningless truism uttered in psychotic repetition. It's going to be there until you write it. Ok.
There are no polar bears in Antarctica.
I can't write you. I can't feel you I can't know you--don't look to me for answers. I have no magic hats. No rabbits.
I'm playing jazz piano now. Dminor7+9 goes to G13 goes to Cmaj6+7+9. The last one requires seven fingers to play. All of one hand part of the other so I'm not writing and besides, it's safer not to let people know what you're feeling all the time. Open books are easier to burn. Two-five-one. The simplist jazz progression is everywhere. You hear it and it feels good.
Yes. This is the way music is supposed to sound, you think. It's probably encoded in our DNA. Even a mboutu bushman would understand two-five-one. This is something human.
Within winter's colorless death we fell in love to the flickering of aurora austrailis.
Even though I have been to their land I have never seen an aurora. The people there moved their hands through sweeping arcs over their heads, gazing upward as they spoke -- when it comes it's here to here, green and yellow and sometimes red and rarely blue. The green is the common, a field in the sky. The yellow is the sun unborn. The red is the night's soul but the blue, when it comes, is religion to existentialists.
There are stories of great things witnessed. You wish you were there. Then you'd be inside the story, instead of a listener. We all want to be stories people want to live.
Please forgive me, I'm an engineer. I don't understand your body language.
When I was a young boy I wondered what women looked like under their clothes. I had dreams. My imagination invented insectile appendages.
I saw my first naked woman as a scheming grammar school kid. Walter Washburn discovered the dumpster behind the liquor store over on Lincoln Highway, next to the Jewel/Osco. In those days if they didn't sell magazines, the magazine people didn't want the unsold merchandise. So the store people ripped off the covers, sent them in, and got full credit for each.
One humid summer day Walter discovered the dumpster behind the liquor store full of unsold issues of Playboy and even Penthouse, which showed everything. If you're going to experience revelation - then know everything. No holds barred. Reality in total.
Walter kept the coverless magazines like treasure. He carried them under his t-shirt, stowed them behind the furnace in his basement, and showed them only in hiding, only in strictest confidence. Not even the NSA could keep such secrets. There was everything in print, purloined, sealed under multiple layers of camo, locks and keys, puzzles upon encrypted puzzle, displayed only to the priests and acolytes like the Ark of the Covenant.
In those days there was no Photoshop, so whatever we saw in a picture had to have been real at one point.
I remember thinking: "This can't be true. Nobody looks like that."
This can't be real. But it is human. All parts of us.
I'm human: to a shark, a fine source of protein.
Alas. And therein the source of problems since Helen of Troy. Was it her face that launched the ships? What was Achilles thinking?
Everybody knows. Testosterone yearns for massive war. It's not happy without the pain that renders us senseless. It seethes. There in the name of love is blood, as she bleeds so do we by the sword. By human hand. The blade that cuts her was made in the wheels of heaven.
We have a real problem with the difference. So easy not to want see that we're all flesh and blood. We're supernatural so we'd rather be protein than human. Better life after than life living.
This can't be real, so it isn't. I'm extrasensory. I'm extraterrestrial. A child of God headed out of this mess, climbing the stairway to heaven.
What of love, then? A strictly human construct, or the material manifestation of angels?
Excuse me, I'm prayerless and I can't map your God. Excuse me, I'm snowblind and I thought you were Athena.
I'm sorry, I fell in love and thought you were my salvation.
Excuse me, I'm a scientist, I don't comprehend your aggression. Excuse me, I'm an atheist, I don't understand your disdain. Excuse me, I'm a Catholic, I don't understand your Zen. Excuse me, I'm Italian, I don't understand your pastaless ennui.
Excuse me, I'm human and my extrasensory powers are dormant.
Excuse me, I don't believe in your deity but he loves me anyway.
Excuse me, I'm an archangel. Do I qualify for the senior citizen discount?
I'm human and I rely on passion to find food.