“If You Can Do Anything Else”

I started writing yet another reflective essay about how I'm not writing the way I wish I were writing. I decided a free verse poem would be more compact -- thus, this column of thought.

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Halloween Day: My Truck, My Tablet, and a Pink House

I called truck #212221 'Desirae'. Google tells me this is a French name for "the one desired". I found a poster of Ray Lewis propped against a pump-canister in the back of the flat-faced Isuzu my manager assigned to me: perhaps a desire but even more a discovery. "I'll call you 'Rae-Rae'-- short for Desirae."…

I watched “Frozen” 4 Times: Anna Through the Gates

Like many of us, Anna thought she could break her lonesome "spell" with a romance, unaware of the antecedent spell in her family. Elsa was correct: "You can't marry a man you just met." Yet I want to defend Anna's initiative: she was outside the gate. Hans didn't come 'calling', she found him while in town, exploring. Unfairly, their parents died unexpectedly and Elsa's reticence took away opportunities for sisterly mentoring. Anna committed a mistake but at least she wasn't paralyzed. Throughout the entire film, Anna takes action: she is on the heroine arc! Anna is the one who seizes Elsa's glove, precipitating the advent of Elsa's full power and an instant winter. The results are terrible, terrifying, and ultimately terrific (see that?). Falling for Hans is part of Anna's heroine arc and key to plot development-- heroines commit blunders, whereas inert princesses are perfect... ly helpless. Anna is our beloved heroine because she is one of us blunderers!

Write to Live: Orange Hyundai

With thanks to "Classy Cars" https://bit.ly/2uJhSorA familiar vehicle paused next to my Pontiac as I lingered at the traffic-light where MD-650 crosses MD-198. From the open window of a burnt-orange Veloster, a hand dangled with a cigarette pinched between two fingers. Full recognition came a second later: it was my ex-girlfriend's ex-husband. The confluences that…

Write to Live: Green Torches

When I was eighteen, I wrote a short-story based on a nightmare. I fled a large man with a sword in and out of doorways, through tunnels, up ladders onto scaffolds (and jumping down again), in an endless maze. The fiction has a distinct beginning and an ending. The story evolved to include a cell,…

Write to Live: A Log on Primeval Trail

Hurtling logs is a semiotic act, for me. I jumped over logs in the thinner forests of spring, pretending I wore T'Challa's skin instead of my own and pacing my heart with drum-music. Summer and new strategies ushered a new cycle of activity, a new trail to run and the bodily impetus to rise earlier…

Write to Live: Musician’s Intuition

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…