old scribbles

circa 2011

Am I an author?

My mind hurtles forward, beating me in my own race, words are too slow…

Too clumsy, too bulky and poorly sanded, their meanings bounce in ten different directions, sentences fall apart, scrape the bottom of a murky river, collect grime and grease and rot before hastily sewing themselves back together and tucking themselves neatly into our earholes.

There comes from some unknown alter-world a breed of word wranglers. Through the confines of our cumbersome dictionaries they grasp the ability to weave just the right words together in just the right order, slowly and with a long thin needle shaping their sentences in a dark room with a dim lamp and a mug of tea.

And there comes from these dark nights and diner booths and decrepit coffee shops these wisps of explanation so pure and so bright that cause knots in the gut of the readers, of the listeners whose ears have received a cool wind in the ear to silence the usual sludgy nothingness.

Life goes by like this; head submerged a few inches below the surface with that constant thirst for oxygen. And when it comes, when that wrangler wrangles and the head breaks free of the water and the air is everywhere and through the body and it is so crisp and so calm, that is when the soul is home.

There are the bottom feeders, and oh how I pity them. There are the clouds and oh how I envy them.