Starting and stopping
Starting and stopping
There’s poetry
But no resolution
Every time I ride a plane
I pick up my old stories and read them again
The tale is always the same
I can track it by the “date modified” title
2011: So many stories
Unfinished, unsung
2013: Plays and screenplays
2014: Poetry began
They rose as a signal
Of life in the darkness
I create therefore I am.
So many stories
Of which I used to scoff
They are so beautiful to me now
Now that I do not judge them
Now that I see my life in a different light
I see the years of growing
I was not born grown as I supposed
I wrestled with demons far greater than me
I wrote mostly of things experienced
About sisters bonds
Of love, unrequited
Of dreams un-ignited
I wrote about seasons
Then there was fantasy
Things I wished I could have said
Melodrama that played in my head
The characters changed the older I grew
When I was young I wrote in the first person as a boy
Then, as I grew, I wrote strong, dramatic women
At first in third person, as though uncomfortable in that
skin
Slowly, autobiography took the place of melodramatic fantasy
I wrote about lovers in Ireland
I wrote about roommates in Queens
I wrote about summers in limbo it seems
It is lovely to see the sudden impulse of writing
That moment when you recognize something about yourself or
about the world
That moment when it is so beautiful words must be spoken
about it
The words themselves forming a sort of musical symphony
whose tone reflects the art it recognizes
These were beautiful attempts
A pressing on the accelerator
But not the journey itself
For journeys are fraught with patient endurance
Instead of wrestling over characters, plots, and the right metaphor,
My writing was unfinished, un-edited, and never revisited
Forever doomed to gather dust on a shelf of misfired ideas
There were a few that I kept going back to
The tetherball image
(For images are my muses)
Wisdom and folly
Fathers and sons
If I could combine them all
I’d have one amazing story
But my writing styles change so much
The inspiration waxes and wanes
It’s like I am five different writers, depending on the day
Multiple personality disorder at it’s finest
They don’t tell you that the fragmented emotions
Create unfinished stories
All the while
I do not believe that I am
In fact, a writer.
Today though,
I desire to start
And stop when the story is done.
