Gray Comfort

Clouds curdle overhead, grim behind the shadows of branches that form grotesque canopies. The light slinks like smoke. The cold bed feels like a marble floor, or a coffin-shaped memory. Trapped in its frost, I yearn for you, black rose lover, an angel with silver skin and the feathers of a crow. I dream of bright blue light, of sweltering suns milking passion from surfaces. I dream of arms and skin, of warmth succored between two sets of bodies, of wet release and beasts, of red lines and weather, of frolicking and glades, of embraces and moans. But all I have is the blanket of clouds. All I have is pain shaped like you. A hole in my summer. Flooded in gray.

20 Tips On Winging It

1. Lay claim to a pen and a journal. Choose them like you would a set of wings: check for wingspan, quill quality, wearability. Stylize, if that’s how you like it. Your pen and paper is customizable anyway. Add extra limbs if need be. Rub with pixie dust or a psychopath’s venom, if that’s your thing. The skinny: a psychopath’s venom is not in their molars. Check their childhoods for more info.
2. Put vampires, zombies, werewolves, wizards and fairy tales in a blender. Let the machine run for 3 days. Pour the gunk in a receptacle and lock with the Devil’s seal. Store it in the basement then forget about the damn thing. If you can’t, take it out into the light and mold them into your own imagination. Pro tip: don’t make anything glitter when they normally don’t. Trust me, it’s not avante garde.
3. Test the quality of your words. Use real emotions. If it’s hard, use your mother. Where available, destroy lives.
4. Steal from Shakespeare. Make his specter cry. Better yet, challenge the Beatniks. Contradict everything Bukowski has ever written. Their fans will plot your tragedy. Stoning is the trend. They’ll do it with books. Invoke the Olympians. Sacrifice 14 virgins to save yourself. Seven males and seven females. Turn some of them gay. For conflict.
5. Go to the cemetery at midnight. Alone. Allow the monsters to scream in your head. Scribe their secrets until the shrieking dissipates.
6. Keep dating. Take your date out on a picnic. Bring a crowbar. Make sure no one else is around.
7. See that you never run out of rum. Or absinthe. Hermit is out this season. Alcohol is the new black.
8. Happy? Go get some angst.
9. Smoke high-grade weed with the heavily-tattooed frontrunner of an underground band. Ink the subsequent intercourse in your blood. If anything, you’ll get a song out of it.
10. Put genre, popcorn, and literary in a fiction bowl. Mix them up into some kind of cereal. Eat with a pen.
11. Live like a rat until you sell a manuscript. Pawn your soul or your humanity. Know when to forfeit either. Art and rat have the same letters. This is not coincidence or affliction. This is destiny. It’s also okay to starve and lose sleep. It’s part of the drill.
12. Despair is part of the drill.
13. Drill hard. 
14. Writing is a martial art. Study. When you meet Loneliness in an alley, you’ll know what to do.
15. Switch the genders of your main characters. For men, I suggest giving them teeth. It’s funny when they bitch. For women, I recommend forging a set of balls in the furnaces of Mount Doom. Make them wear it whenever necessary.
16. Back roads are sometimes better. Highways are overrated.
17. Bargain your soul for high quality chains. If you are currently out of soul, bargain someone else’s. They won’t miss it. Then wait for your Muse. When she comes, knock her unconscious and use the chain to manacle her to your work desk. When you run out of ink, use her blood.
18. Live somewhere else. Preferably outside your head.
19. Go live in the moon for a while.
20. Don’t return until gray-blue. (Or until you get a sense of humor. Or a sense of what you are, writer.)

What A Writer Is

In the beginning, be a weird kid. You’ve always known you were different, anyway. When the shoe fits, wear it. You start eating bits of newspaper at age seven so that by age eight you can start dining secretly on Reader’s Digest. Let a picture of a makeshift graveyard in a war issue stick in your head. Make your own version in the backyard for the toys you no longer play with. Decorate the graves with little crosses by tying barbecue sticks together with black thread. Freak out your mother big time.

At fourteen, take an unusual interest, like the occult. Carry black candles in your bulky backpack and a big book about the history of witchcraft. Learn cartomancy, the tarot and casting the runes. Read the future from the bottom of your teacup even though you’ve never drank tea. When your seatmates at homeroom sneer at your book on magic charms, smile smugly at these unbelievers. You know better.

Scour obscure stores downtown for silver rings and wear them around three fingers on each hand. Tie a homemade amulet around your wrist, one which carries an engraving of a pentagram. Your Catholic school will not approve, but as far as you are concerned there aren’t any rules against wearing jewelry. Later, you will find out that a policy against anti-Christian symbols exists. Don’t submit. The nun/principal will threaten you with suspension. Delay following her orders. See what will happen next. The next time you meet her in her office, her anger will rival Vesuvius. Her tongue will slip. She will tell you those “revolting things” make a you look like a “cultic deviant”. You won’t know what these words mean. Your English is shady at best. Look the words up in the dictionary. When you find them, laugh out loud. Then get angry.

Bring a black hard-bound notebook to school the next day. Your Book of Shadows. Your hand will feel empty without your rings. Find a quiet spot on the library floor. On the first page, write the word “Misunderstood”. Continue with another line. This time go where the pain takes you. Later you will discover that you have achieved your first ever successful spell. You don’t feel rotten anymore. Any feeling of decay has been transferred to the words you’ve written.

“Magic,” a voice somewhere will rap in your ears.

~

Let your friends tell you how dumb you are. Begin watching the movies that make them “smart”. Struggle. Rewind. Replay. By the end of the year, your English will improve enormously. Use words that make people scratch their heads. Now it’s your turn to tell them how dumb they are. Watch foreign TV shows. Emulate how the actors speak. Use their expressions. A few months more and you will begin thinking in English.

Fall in love with a straight boy. He will ask you to write an essay for his English final. Ask him what you will get in return. A kiss, he will promise. Write the essay with love and blood. It will get him an A. Let him tell you where you should meet for your “little prize”. He will bring a whole bunch of his friends along. When you arrive at the place with butterflies in your heart, they will laugh at you. Run home. Cry.

The next day, people at school will begin calling you “fag”. A group of senior students will pee in your backpack while you are at PE class. No one will confess. The nun/principal will shrug awkwardly. Hate Catholics. Emancipate from the faith. Fall in love with cusswords. The next time the bullies descend, scream words that will make the whole Vatican blush. Become a pariah in your school. Secretly delight in it. Secretly drown in tears.

~

Bury yourself in other things. Read books. Even though your upbringing discourages reading. Read all kinds, including the trashy ones. When you’re done with one, move on to the next, relentlessly. Read books that make your crotch itch, your eyes tear up, your heart palpitate–with pleasure or otherwise. Read poetry and imitate your favorite poets. During trig, write a sonnet in your Math notebook about how a math teacher was found murdered in her classroom. Write the villanelle version. Experiment with rhyme, meter, assonance, and beat. Fail. Really fail. Shift to free verse. Then try writing prose. Here, anything is possible. You don’t have to count octets and sestets, or pentameters. You don’t have to rhyme.

The next day, look at the teacher as she scribbles math equations across the blackboard. Write down the first sentences of your first story: “Mrs. Malat was missing during assembly. We speculated that she had either been whisked away to the beach by an unfortunate lover or she’s had a heart attack. Either way it meant one thing: no homework. The next thing we heard, she had been murdered. There are many suspects that come to mind, including myself.”

Decide that the story has potential. Smile. Entitle the story: “The Numbers Didn’t Die with the Math Teacher.”

The students at school will continue calling you “fag” and other creative derivatives. Meet Indifference. She will be your bestfriend.

~

In junior year, hate all of your subjects, except English. Replace the Math book with Bulfinch. Renounce Chemistry for J.D. Salinger. Be the pet of Ms. Raymundo, your English teacher. Stay behind after class to discuss mythology, banned books, women liberation, and The Screwtape Letters. Tell her C.S. Lewis de-virginized you. She’ll introduce you to other writers. She will start with Tolkien.

Prowl the library for rare finds, books nobody bothers to check out: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Edmund Rostand, Franz Kafka. Take your hunger to a second-hand bookstore. Search for Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Jerzy Kozinski, D.H. Lawrence, Lawrence Durrell, Simone de Beauvoir, even Erica Jong–they are the “illegal” authors in your school, as Ms. Raymundo would say in class; afterwards she will wink at you, “Look for these scribes,” she’s really saying.

Try out for the high school paper. Get in and start with feature stories. Your moderator will dote over your work. A year later, she will appoint you editor-in-chief. Beat the associate editor who has written for the paper for four years. Your friends (oh, two people) will applaud you. The associate editor and her friends will plot your death.

Become compromised when the guidance counselor finds you smoking with Marty, the languorously handsome lay-out artist, in the school paper’s office. You are reading a tattered copy of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. Marty has a hard-on sketching a naked woman injecting junk. The counselor only cares about the cigarette, but the principal will not let the book pass. “Someone might not graduate,” she croons, like a little demon hiding under her sanctimonious veil. Decide she looks like an insect. At home, write a story about a mutant insect that lands in the baseball field of a Catholic high school. Call the story “A Cockroach Runs A School.”

Your mother will not look amused when she returns from a close-door meeting with the principal. She only wants what’s best for her son. The fact that she was a bohemian in the sixties and used to smoke like a steamboat doesn’t change anything. She will not tolerate anything that might jeopardize her son’s education. She did not graduate from university. She’s the eldest of nine children and was her family’s breadwinner. She knows how tough life can be. Furious, she will say: “You want to read filth, fine, read filth. Read the Kama Sutra for all I care, but do it here. Not in school. And the next time I hear that you smoke, I will tear out your lungs myself. Do you get that?!” Later in your room, wonder what in hell is the Kama Sutra.

~

You are a geek, but don’t ignore your growth. You are, first and foremost, an adolescent. Your hormones are infuriated. Think of sex. Think of it a lot. Then write about it. Use your imagination. Use your fingers.

~

Decide that your house isn’t a very writer-friendly environment. Your mother and sister don’t know when to leave you alone. Despite seeing that you are writing, they engage you in unnecessary small talk. If there’s nothing to do they turn on the TV automatically, or the radio, and leave it on, which breaks your trance and chases away your concentration. You can’t get a moment’s silence. Keen. Slam your bedroom door. Throw things about. Grab your hair and pull. In the bathroom, fill a huge pail with water. Duck your head in and scream.

“Are you okay?” your mother will ask. She’s worried that you might be needing a father and she might not be enough to substitute the role. She wants to call her husband who is currently stationed in some remote mountain in Riyadh. She wants to tell him that his son has inherited his mental infirmities.

Say: “No one understands me.” Tell your mother that you need a cigarette. Instantly, her mood will take a darker shape. She has a bad history with cancer. Her favorite sister died of it at 23. Three months ago, she learned that her cervix is slowly being eaten by it. “All right, smoke,” she will tell you. “But move out first.”

On a Saturday morning, you will overhear your mother on the phone: “He just writes a lot. Locks himself away in his room for hours. He won’t earn money that way. I just hope he doesn’t starve in the future.” Think about this. Start writing. Skip breakfast. Title the story: “A Starved Future.”

~

For the first real time, fall in love. And buy condoms. Buy plenty. Be mad for sex. Be mad for love. Then get hurt. Get burnt. Get your heart torn apart. Not just once. Not just ten times. Learn to heal by writing. Remember that you used to transfer pain into a blank page by filling it with words. “Write your despair,” your best friend will tell you. “It’s the cheapest form of therapy.”

~

Watch Andrew, your gorgeous artist friend, roll joints in a ridiculously meticulous manner. “Just like handling a woman,” he will say. Use that as a trigger and start developing a story about three men who treat their women the same way they roll their joints. Send it to the annual literary competition of schools in your district. Fail to win. Be miserable. This kind of suffering is required. You need more of this to be truly prepared.

Search for academic quality, an unusual occurrence even in the best schools in the province. Enroll in summer media workshops. Study acting. Go to film production. Take a film appreciation course. “You’re extremely insightful,” your instructor, a retired but renowned international director, will say of your reviews. He will write the following comment on the front page: “Such creative, satirical analysis and powerful language for someone so young.” He will tell you that you should get into a career in writing. Let this go to your head. Go home and write a story. Send it to the next competition. Win first place. You will keep winning three years in a row.

The state of publishing in your country will disillusion you. A market is nonexistent, and whatever insubstantial opportunities that survive do not exactly lead to financial fulfillment. Only a very small percentage of your country’s population reads. Being an accomplished author means subsisting like a rodent. The only way to succeed in this vocation is to get published abroad. Let this depress you. Give up on writing. Reread your journals and realize that everything you’ve ever written is tremendous and absolute crap. How can your writing compete with authors from, say, the States? Make a bonfire in the backyard. Burn all the notebooks you’ve bought and toiled through. Do not cry. Let your fury take over instead. Tell yourself you will never write again.

~

Read two books a day. Read the difficult ones: Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, Roy’sThe God of Small Things, Morrison’s Beloved, Murakami’s Kafka On The Shore. Read charming gems: Hoffman’s Practical Magic, Letts’ Where The Heart Is, Wells’ The Divine Secrets Of The Ya-ya Sisterhood.

Discover that sadness inspires you. Find out that you are a romantic inside and out. Read the South American writers: Laura Esquivel, Isabel Allende, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Decide that you can be good at what they do. You can shape your own style. You can mix elements you know well: Filipino folklore, rich description, dark humor, and biting dialogue.

The desire for writing will trickle into your head. A few books more and it will be completely submerged. Your hand will reach for a pen again. Do not stop it. Buy a notebook and embrace the only truth you know. Take inspiration from all the little miracles that surround you. Practice vigilance in finding them: in the sunlight, the trash, the rain. Pay attention to shapes, textures, shadows, and melodies. Touch and taste them, if you could. As you write the first words, promise yourself that whatever happens, you’ll never stop writing.

~

Pile magazines on the floor. Cut the images that affect your senses: symbols, words, photos, drawings. Paste them in a thick notebook. Each time you are slumped or feel uninspired, open the notebook and peruse. Use the cutouts as triggers. Look for poetry in paintings and other artworks. Use them in metaphors. Fill a whole notebook with them:

• clad in transparent garments, she is Boticelli’s Venus
• bored of housekeeping, she imagines Michelangelo’s David come to life and ravage her on the kitchen table
• simplicity in its most complicated manifestation–Mona Lisa’s smile?
• possible image: illuminated shadows… a painting of Rembrandt

Study painters and writers who have “lost it”. Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Van Gogh. Wonder if you are the reincarnation of any of them. Maybe you are their mutation.

~

Present the first chapter of your newest novel to your bestfriend. She will hand it back. “You always leave me hanging with all these ‘first chapters’. Finish a book, okay? Then I will read it.” Tell her she’s brilliant. Maybe you can put together a collection of first chapters.

Meet your other friends. Say: “I will be successful. I will publish a lot of books. You will read all of them.”

“We don’t read, man,” they will reply. “But we will buy two copies of each.”

~

Look for people who are interested in reading your writings. These are rare jewels. Let them tell you what they think about your work. The good. The bad. Better yet, let them write their thoughts down. Stick their comments on the pages of your journal. Half of these will feed your ego. Half will dwarf your arrogance. All will inspire, more importantly.

Meet all sorts of people: teachers, law students, pseudo-artists, drug junkies, existentialists, anarchists, yuppies, LGBT activists, bisexuals, has-beens, mediums, hobbits, Neanderthals, etc. Meet foreigners. Koreans, Japanese, Vietnamese, Chinese, Thai, Belgians, Germans, Americans, Dutch. They make good learning experience. Some of them will even become your good friends. Or more. Let these people talk. Listen to their stories. Let their cultures open your mind wider into the world. It’s almost as good as traveling. Listen for things you can use.

Write these stories down. You never know when you can use them. They can start a story, lengthen its body, or be an effective ending. It can strengthen the characters, make descriptions more vivid, or pull a reader’s sympathy. Use them what-fucking-ever way you want. Use all you can to write and share what you’ve written. There might be no money in it. You might not end up publishing anything. But don’t stop writing. Don’t ever stop. Because this is what you are. Your heart beats, your blood boils, your soul seeks to write. You are a writer. You don’t know how you know it exactly, but you just are.

Apparently, all I can do now is reblog.

Because, pretty soon this blog will be no more.

Hold it. That was an intentional pull. Writer’s rule and shit.

I am going for some changes, and it’s not something I am doing for anyone else. My craft online seemed to have reached a plateau and my desire for blogging has all but diminished. I don’t know when it will happen or how. But certainly, the contents in this blog will be deleted. Most of it. The good news is, in a desperate move with possibly narcissistic intentions, I’m putting all deleted contents together in an eBook that I will make available for free so that if you hate the new blog, you can unfollow me and still have the old one with you. Creating an entirely new blog is too much work, and although it’s so fun to deactivate and cause a momentary ripple online and make people look for me, I’m too old and weary for that shit. You probably deserve to know why am I doing this. The answer is that I don’t think I have the heart to blog anymore. The “changes” will be my attempt at rekindling that and I really hope it works. If anything, there are people here I owe so much to that I need a go signal from before I fully disappear. For now, it’s the only reason I’m hanging on.

In the meantime, I’ll reblog old stuff. Don’t worry, they are the shit.

You can message me, too. I’m lonely.

Floodgate

I hate myself when I get meditative. This happens without warning, no preamble of any sort. Sometimes, I wake up and feel the weight of the world. Then I’d just start reflecting, mostly on useless things. Throughout the day, overflowing with this loneliness, I’d find myself falling in love a hundred times, and half of those times with inanimate objects. I’d love the way sunlight trickles through the surfaces of leaves, for example. I’d love the way a man walks in the street. I’d love the way shoes resound from cobblestones and sidewalks. I’d love cigarette smoke as it curls thickly out of someone’s mouth.

Today I was at the park, brooding, sketching my subconscious in my little notebook, when a young man came and sat on the next bench. He had a beard, unkempt hair, wore a plaid polo shirt over weekend jeans. All of a sudden, I was sure that I was in love with him. There was no logic there. But it was a viable emotion. My entire body pulsated with an energy that was solid in its conviction. Why am I like this? I took one look at how the afternoon light slink through his fair skin and I am blown away. I looked at his unshaven jaw, this man I barely know, and I was certain my emotion was tangible and authentic. I even swooned at the way he leaned back on the bench, arms outstretched, so confident and sturdy; then I caught myself starting to build fantasies around that image. How could I take something this illogical so seriously? I’m a freak, that’s probably why. I’m a verified loon.

Staring at this man, I felt desolation rise in my throat. I knew what this was. This was the undiluted hunger for human connection. The hunger of my soul to find its match. Not necessarily an amorous match. It could be affinity my soul craves for. My heart gets flooded sometimes that it just erupts. It wraps around the nearest thing it could drown so my soul could survive.

Then the bitch of a storm I expected to come bellowed after the few minutes of blind euphoria. I felt the devastating strike of despair descend upon me. The truth of my circumstance reconciled with rationality. It came to me, like the abrupt drawing of curtains that stirs a man crudely from his dreams. This was the reason I was alone. I poured my heart out too easily and stripped my spirit bare much too early in the game. I needed to remind myself that life was a game I learned late to play.

I hate myself when I get meditative. It is during these times that I realize my yearning has never truly left me, no matter how hard I’ve tried to kill it in the passage of years. Although I’ve managed to use my scars as weapons, my heartbreaks as armor, my sorrow as ammunition, deep inside I’m just a scared and lonely boy. An emaciated spirit longing for company. For someone to hold me. Someone to return the love.

Wake up, I told myself. Truth doesn’t hurt… It mangles and never leaves you numb. Time doesn’t heal. It cleaves your soul in half.

An old post. Similar Questions In My TA

What does your writing center around? Or are all your pieces so different? 
Tumblr, for me, is a personal platform. Very few people post full-length stories here, and when they do, a very small number of people read them. Consequently, the result are short monologues. These “musings” are not publishable in print. I do what I can with them, experiment with style and the like when I want to. I sometimes post very short stories, with actual characters and a plot, but the bulk of my writing is not posted in this blog. Fear of plagiarists (I had been plagiarized and it tasted like acid) is enough of a deterrent against posting my more important work. I used to, but I took them all down. My offline writing reads differently than my writing here. I rarely write in the first person when I’m writing a short story. Also, using various characters, settings and plot actually involves research, character studies, voice and so on. I’ve written stories in a number of genres so my writing doesn’t center around anything. Ultimately, I feel that everything has already been written. It is in the way you write about them that makes them fresh and different.

Who are your influences? Do music and arts influence your writing style? My writing style depends on what or who I’m writing about, or who I’m writing as. Music and other artforms inspire me, but I am more interested in using them as symbols, or to add character to my protagonists. I’ve never written to a song though, or based my writing exclusively on an artpiece. I like things quiet when I write. I find music distracting (mostly because I am prone to reaching for a mousse bottle, lip-synching and pretending I’m in a concert where everyone loves me. In fact, I was Adele a few minutes ago, and James Morrison before that.)

Books are another matter. I was addicted to Anne Rice when I was younger. Then Neil Gaiman. Then Tolkien’s Silmarillion and Edith Hamilton’s Mythology made my desire relentless and immense. Then Sylvia Plath, the Beatniks, Walt Whitman, Anne Sexton and Shakespeare drove me to poetry. Then the South American writers got me. Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (“100 Years of Solitude” was divine, but I got bored 1/3 through; his shorter pieces, I could stand. I like “Of Love and Other Demons” best). Then J.D. Salinger (“Franny and Zooey”). Then Bret Easton Ellis, Franz Kafka, Haruki Murakami, David Sedaris, Dennis Lehane (“Until Gwen” was amazing), Michael Chabon, David Foster Wallace, Joyce Carol Oates, and so many more.

A.M. Homes (“Georgica” and “A Real Doll”), Isabel Allende (“The Stories of Eva Luna”), David Shickler (“The Smoker”, “Opals”, “Wes Amerigo’s Fear of the Unknown”), Alice Hoffman (“Blackbird House” and “Local Girls”) brought me back to my first love: writing short stories. I’m currently writing two novels that are made up of interlacing yet standalone short stories. My first manuscript “All Things Blue” was done in this style. Having said that, my deepest influence is actually reading. I used to emulate the way my favorite books were written (I don’t really have favorite authors. My taste is pretty eclectic as you probably noticed. I’ll read anything.). I did this until I developed my own voice.

What is the first ever piece you wrote that you were proud of and what inspired you to follow this avenue?I wrote the longer version of the following droubble in high school. I realized writing was something I had to explore, be better at, and keep doing. I’ve never stopped since.

Euthanasia

Darkness. His little piece of hell. Darkness swallowing him.
     Drifting in and out of consciousness. Mordant pain testing the boundaries of his fortitude. In the unquantifiable distance he imagined the bellows echoing from a torture room, where pain macerates resolve and spirit.
     He was floating, and the water surrounding him has the stench of doom. He felt soaked, not in liquid but in insatiable agony, and his insides seemed ripped apart. Misery upon misery.
     What is the desire for survival when contested against the craving for death?
     Pain is like an echo trapped inside his skin, returning like an endless whirlwind of anguish and vicious misfortune.
     Strobes of light, static, pain.
     Hallucinations: splashing, moist things, scent of billowing decay, water thundering.
     “Hurry,” someone says.
     “I’m almost done!”
     He waited for the voices of heaven. Instead, darkness pressed ever greater.
     Isn’t the light supposed to come last? Where did my light go? Why is darkness replacing it? Am I headed towards… hell?
     Then came the abrupt finality. Pure, undiluted darkness, the perfect absence of light, the novelty of death.

And so the little spider, trapped for hours in the toilet bowl and flushed mercilessly down the drain, met his grim demise. 

Tell us something about your process. How often do you experience writer’s block? What is that like for you, and how do you counteract it?
Confine me in a room for hours, and I’d be happy beating ennui to a pulp by writing a story about walls that talk. Imagine the possibilities.

There are three major forces that usually prompt me into writing. Love, loneliness, and lethargy. I’m not in love at the moment and we are only ever as lonely as we allow ourselves to be. But obviously, I still write about those things and then some, but it’s not about necessarily feeling them at the time of writing. I just harness the emotion, recall what it feels like, and let it move me from there. My loneliness is unimportant compared to people with actual problems. But loneliness is a universal emotion. I’d stand to say it’s even more universal than joy. Happiness is a little more “individual”. I find myself having difficulty relating to other people’s happiness. But pain and solitude? When I write about those, I notice more people can relate.

I don’t wait for the Muse. I make mine arrive. I write everyday. A drabble is good practice. Reading a book helps. I also challenge myself by writing about things I am afraid of or things I know very little about, and by exploring styles and genres. I make bucket lists. Sestina today, science fiction tomorrow.

I don’t believe in writer’s block or in the excuse “I have nothing to write about.” It’s silly. If anything, writer’s block depends on the writer’s dedication and decision to write. If you really wanted to write, there is nothing that could stop you. Look outside the window, for example. Take that bird you see perched on a tree. Make it talk about your neighbor and reveal some wicked secret. Or take one of your old stories and write it from a different perspective: one of the minor characters, a reflection, a passerby, a cat. Or take the last paragraph of an old poem and use that as the first paragraph of a new poem. Constrain the syllable count, or the lines. See where that gets you. Or open a magazine. Flip it to a random image and use that picture in a story. The more you want to sound perfect in your writing, the more difficult writing becomes. That’s not a block, that’s a fault. Draft. You can always edit after. My journals are filled with shitty outlines and sketches that usually look nothing like their finished product.

I just write. The process is in the waking (and sometimes in sleep as well, in the dreaming). All the music I hear today, all the things I see, all the positive and negative stimulation I experience is a collective foreplay of my art. I take them all in – the details and the implications – and I take them with me when I finally decide at some point of the day to sit and write.

Seriously. I thank the Tumblr gods every day I see you on my dash.

Posting because I don’t get these comments often and this just knocked my hangover off (just “woke” up). 

Thanks, darlin. Not just for knocking off the hangover, but for everything else. hehe.

Poetic Justice a.k.a The Dark Side Of Things

Distance cheats. Emotional and physical. Take forbiddances and miles, if you need an example. Proximity is important to lovers, families, friendships. The physical nearness is crucial to the growth of relationships. How many of those has Distance destroyed? How many semblances of affinity have been crushed or snuffed out like a candlewick? Distance takes without mercy. His dark silver skin shines with every step that dissociates people from each other. There is no ignoring the lashings with which Distance smites us. Distance steals the moments we could spend with those we cherish. It takes away our ability to witness. It takes away portions of intimacy.

Time cheats. And she does so with passion. Her hair has flames that incinerate youth, that burn beginnings before they can be truly formed. Time takes ruthlessly, and she cackles behind every wrinkle, every missed flight, every late turn. She holds a rope around the frail neck of every regret. We sit and Time snatches the days right from under our noses. We rest and Time pilfers our repose. Flesh to bone; brick to dust; beauty to wilting; novelty to archaic, and sometimes to something much older and forgettable. Time filches our memory, our bodies, our happiness. Her brutal grin stretches with more savagery as she passes. There is a perverse kind of cruelty behind every hour, and there is malice behind every passage of a year. No one can escape Time. We are every bit the victim.

Chance cheats. No one is born the same. No one grows with the same adversities. Some people call him Fate because we have no choice against what he capriciously dishes out. Some people call him Luck because not everything has the same eminence. Chance makes poverty more pronounced in others. Not just fleshly poverties but poverty in spirit… in emotion. Tragedy also becomes more apparent in others. Had we been born in reversals of our current states, I doubt we would have the same providence or outcomes. That’s how Chance reaps. His claws are as inexorable as eternity. Chance decides to halt or continue. He directs the flow of consequence, and we are all trapped.

Love cheats. Let that statement soak in your heads for a bit. Then look at all the poetry you’ve created. The prose you have posted. The conflicts. The terror. The heartbreak. Nothing breaks even with Love. She is unwavering, unpredictable, and the most coldblooded of all. Bitterness will not exist if Love didn’t occur. Vengeance will not be as palpable. Depression will lose half its power. Madness will not flare. A host of a thousand other things would have been weakened by half, or wouldn’t have endured. But Love is eternal, and she splits hearts eternally. Love severs without even trying. She creeps with her venom and hides behind the promise of warm things, yet she is as cold and airless as the galaxy. Love laughs. She knows that we always give in.

But without these forces, life would be meaningless, wouldn’t it? They are loathsome but necessary. When do we wager on but in the wake of a tragedy. When do we learn but in heartbreak. When do we start creating and building new things but in the trail of loss. Everything is ephemeral. But where are we driven to push the limits of our humanness, or challenge our constraints, or defy our limits? In our transient joy or our impermanent sadness?

All pieces of art are attempts at immortality. We hanker to preserve things because they are fleeting. We try to capture moments in photographs, feelings in paintings, statements in sculptures, imaginary lives in books, our own lives in poetry, because they will all diminish. We can’t live without our afflictions. Our misfortunes make our lives full. We eat these forces up because they compel us to aspire. They force us to live. We suffer because we never quit.

I’d say that’s the biggest retribution we can bestow these motherfuckers. The most potent finger we can give, if you asked me. We could be living without justice. But we are living, god damn it.

Poetic? Definitely.

~

[from my book “The Couplehundred Project and Other Shorts”. Get a copy while it’s still on sale. For more details on my books, click here.

Suffering The Daylight

Today’s birdsong is especially sweet at 7:30 a.m. It carries the sound of possibilities. For a second it’s almost believable that there is hope beyond your bedroom door. But the headache pounds and you’ve only had four hours of sleep, and even though your eyes carry the weight of a buffoon you can’t return no matter how hard you seduce sleep to ensnare you. Even the dreams refuse to touch you. Not even when you’re spread-eagled and willing.

Coffee doesn’t help. There’s too much romanticism and sentimentality when you pause to think. Somehow, your mind seems overrun: is hope something you could pull from thin air? If so, where does it come from? Faith? Blindness? Obstinacy? Because there has been nothing in your life to guarantee a reward for hope. Living is being at war with the world. You start running at birth. Growing up means you have to run twice as fast. Maybe hope comes from reason. Not logic, but motive.

I stare at the daylight outside the window and wonder at how it makes color beautiful and wounding at the same time. Optimism and yearning mesh underneath it. Burn and radiance telling you they are the same thing.

Daylight knows the secrets of inner pain.  

The Portrait Of A Writer As Recluse

In your mountain your blood designs the flow of greens.
In your wooden chair you dream of shadows and sheens.

Sometimes you wish you were one of the oldest trees that reside in the forest of life. Weatherbeaten, timeworn, formidable, and wise. You would know secrets most of us live for but die before discovering. You would know the stirrings that stream the glade. You would know the music of storms.

Sometimes you wish you were a citadel that slices the sky in ironland. August, dominant, cruel and deathless. You would know the power most of us desire but kill our souls for having. You would know the suffering that thrives in the dirt. You would know the opera of screams.

Sometimes you wish you were a stone that remains steady in the country of grass. Anesthetized, ageless, solid and indifferent. You would know the numbness most of us feel but never understand. You would know the voices of midnight. You would know the war in stillness.

In your cigar clouds you form columns from the rain.
In your solitude you create torches from pain.

How you wish you were brave enough to steal other people’s dirty laundry and learn well enough to wear them in the street. How you wish you were leading a ship to the darkness of the mad and steer long enough to emerge as a fleet. How you wish your tongue was slick enough to taste the dryness of bones and lap up the marrow without being discreet.

In your patchwork you form an image from the din.
In your silence you harness noises from within.