Process

Sometimes, I catch words
with swift strikes from nimble fingers
as they swoop through the breeze.
Hold them in the cages my palms make
and try to get them to settle, stroking
their ears and kissing their cheeks
and telling them it’s okay, and they can
be mine for just a little while.
But sometimes, when I sit them down
on a page and open my fingers to type,
they flap their little wings and fly away.
And I’m left with nothing but whiteness and
lonely keys, wishing someone would touch them
just there.
Me and my computer sigh, and wait.

Sometimes, they come to me
like an explosion. Like the time the microwave
sparked and came to life, flame upon flame, smoke
and the smell of burning plastic. Sometimes the
words rush up the length of my face. They smell toxic
but I part my lips and swallow them anyway. Letting
them cook me from the inside, as I open a new document
and burn.
The font on Word looks sharper on these nights,
like knives of thought and blades of steel,
and these words, nobody sees.

Sometimes, it’s vivid like a trip on sugar.
Brightness assaulting my eyes, and I can hear
music in the distance, as images dance before me,
words laughing and fluttering in the breeze, jumping over puddles,
spray painting the streets. They flirt with reality, giggling
over coffee cups and playing with sunlight. They’re photogenic like
I wish I was, and from no angle can they look
or sound
or feel
ugly.
And those are the times I wish I could draw, because these aren’t just
symbols and syllables of language churned through time and place and
people,
they’re something deeper, less divisive,
than the grammar that slits us.
My computer feels so loved
when these words drip into its memory.
The machine feels more human.

Sometimes, the words don’t come at all.
I think I see them like dust particles flitting between
rays of sunlight, or the spray of a light drizzle
or a broken wing of a dead butterfly, and I breathe, breathe,
breathe them in, the scent of them. Always on the hunt for
the things that make me feel connected to this slowly decaying planet.
And they just refuse to listen. They do it on purpose, I think
because they tire of how I search and demand,
forcing them to lay bare on pages, to be read
by eyes they don’t recognise and to convey
messages they don’t believe in.
Sometimes they stay away from me,
the slaver,
the jailer,
the writer,
and make me miss them so I know
how little I am without them.

So I use force, snatching every one in sight.
They shriek, they snarl, they stain my screen.
They refuse to stay in the houses I’ve built,
refuse to voice the things I’ve felt. They
like to think it’s a power struggle where I’m at their mercy,
begging and pleading for them to liberate me.
And just
listen.
My computer watches me fight,
fingers shaking, hitting backspace.

I’m told there’s nothing more romantic
than a writer, tortured; artist sculpted
from passion and pain. There’s nothing greater
in the world that hides its superficiality with
quotes stolen off Goodreads, posters of paintings
and long terms that end in ‘-ism’,
and feeds the starving masses
with sermons of the beauty of the human mind,
the fragility of the human condition,
the complexity of the human being,
dropping the H-bomb as though it means something.
It’s just a name we call ourselves.
A species so lost in its own narcissism,
that we turn to art to validate our humility,
forgetting that art
is both the tool
and the product
of conceit.