“… I’m definitely not interested in this idea that there are blank issues, like women’s issues or black issues. If you are really good at hurting black people, you will indeed hurt the environment, I promise you … it’s true. If you are really good at hurting women, you’re probably also interested in war — I promise you.”
— Jericho Brown / “Small Truths and Other Surprises”
“So I’m interested in where love goes awry or where people use violence as an excuse for love. And I’m interested in seeing how that comes out in my poems, because it’s where I can keep asking myself questions.”
— Jericho Brown / “Small Truths and Other Surprises”
Imagine you’re on the streets of a yellow-down blown downtown. The rat’s nest smell of putrefaction—no one about, but you and the moles. Nothing moves, nothing glitters. There are canyons and spans of unused sound for the taking—for the making. There are mounds of round bodies, gray and oracular, frozen in time. Nothing moves, nothing glitters. There are cracked trees on the outskirts, brittle and bastioned—grasping at air—cragged in time. Monticules of spent cartridges rusted and dull. Nothing moves, nothing glitters. A thickness in the atmosphere—a metallic tang on your tongue. Shards of bones and jawless skulls stretch from here to the pale hills. You stay. You like quiet. Nothing moves, nothing glitters.
“When our women had all turned into cedar trees they would group together in a corner of the graveyard and moan in the high wind.”
The image: a chipped tooth, a bloody mouth, a spray of bloody saliva that fans out onto your date’s white dress shirt. The instant that nervous smile withers on her face. That is my image, my few words for the day. Because I write everyday.
“I think the world is dying because we were dead to its astonishments pretty much. It’ll be around but it will become less and less until it’s finally compatible with our feelings for it.”
Don’t fight the demons in your head—that will always be a losing proposition. You must realize the demons are there. The demons were invited in at an impressionable age and will always live in your head. You should acknowledge the demons and realize that they will not go away; they will reside in your head as long as you have consciousness. Embrace those demons; they are part of you, and then release them every time they appear and they will eventually dissipate of their own accord. They may stop manifesting themselves as often as they do now, or they may not, but railing against them and haranguing yourself for having them with you will amount to nothing but a self-imposed misery. They will always be there, or at the peripheries, and you must deal with that.
Best & Love—
C.
“Too many things to name are gone and we are left with this clowning earth, these cynical trees—shadows, all, of themselves. And we, too, are beyond help.”
Maybe adapt a scene from a nonfiction setting on shipwrecked cay.
Maybe not.
Use these words liberally: ablation; asperity; cassocks; chasubles; hooded cowls; astringent; incursive; afflux; minikin; Grand Guignol; rutilant; cadge; rebus; limpid; enmity; hackles; pathoformic; sabbat; afflatus.
Format: one-hundred / 100-word chapters.
End abruptly, midway through the narrative, and append a long footnote that elucidates nothing.
Add Autocorrected Texts and Overheard Conversational Automatism.
Include two single word chapters: “Isotope” and “Gunplay” on pages 33 and 66, respectively.
Include the anecdote about the Girl Scout merit badge you were awarded for Sailing.
Title the work: Lime Automatic See-Thru Cats Aging in the He Code Other Using Nixon No-Stow Straws
Include the anecdote about Harry and Jerry not having cottage cheese on their plates at your Sweet Sixteen BBQ—and how Stone took the big wooden spatula and rammed it into Orpheus.
Remember people are usually pessimistic about rain.
Include the scene where you make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for every potential boyfriend on the first date.
Include the line: “I’m not a hipster.”
Don’t disappoint anyone.
No one was mad at you!
Remember what Dr. Greene said: “Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.”
Include the words THE END.
“The end of this story should give us hope, but it doesn’t give us hope.”
A vicious penny farthing flashes across the window, as the dreadful coins are placed upon her eyes. The incantations from the holy man’s mouth sound like blaspheme as the sky grows bright outside.
We move across the floor in time to the funeral dirge, we move across time with the conviction of ascetic monks. When we stop the shadows affix us to our places; we stop sobbing and silence fills the empty spaces.
As the sun arcs out the top of the window, we remain frozen in place. The shadows grow long in filtered light and we grow as we stand here still.
“Of all that thrives among Satan’s noisome progeny, the rock drill and mosquito.”
