A little past to season the present
I want to unpack this notion of "writing to live", presently. It cannot be a hollow, "just do it", reductionist-species of motivational phrase. This fresh axiom also needs separated from another, superficially-similar suggestion to "write like your life depends upon it." These two sentences come from different poetics. To write as if my entire life… Continue reading Write to Live: Musician’s Intuition
The ember in my core seeded my body, as if blue flames reached like trees from the stubble along my neck, spinal ridges, the crests of my shoulders. I am a land of fire, again relishing the sensation of burning as I stare into backyard flames -- flashing orange in the company of friends. I… Continue reading The Fires of June
Like a swarm of jellyfish afloat in a swell, an uncountable glut of balloons offer trailing threads of many colors and rise away. If I grab the blue string, will I need to gather every thread of that hue to succeed at blues? Or must I make bundles of rainbow colors, yet miss the bulbs of indigo I cannot see?
The Pith Re-emerges Winter's tentacles remained on my mind and held me under at my ebb-tide. Time, weeks more, froze in suspense by anti-virtues wrought from the wrong drugs given with good intentions. The summer-self emerges like cactus fronds breaking the brittle soil. The scorching and freezing is over, the pith has survived to emerge,… Continue reading Grabbing a Greased Crocodile
I wept Sunday. Cradling an iPhone in my lap, earbuds like IV-lines between my father and me, I sat on the floorboards of my friends' attic, near the brightly-lit hole leading to my room, and finally found my fountain. Bizarrely, I had not wept at all during this entire painful period and I was aware.… Continue reading Cactus Adonis
"The Szechuan Pepper Daddies" were the improvising-troupe who threw fortune cookies at random as they entered, inviting an audience member to open one as a prompt for their show. I saw the 'Pepper Daddies' in the second-round of the Fighting-Improv-Smackdown-Tournament (b.k.a. "FIST") that Washington Improv Theater hosts every year. They lost to "The Prosecution" in… Continue reading The Great Fortune Cookie Spiral
I hit a concrete column as I tried to enter a slot in the underground parking structure at Safeway grocery store. My surprise at my nonchalance did not quite overpower an ambient numbness. I hit the same spot on my bumper's edge (right-side, under the headlight) that struck the stump when I slid off the… Continue reading 1562 Pennies Later…
