justwrite 19 november

I would like to write about doubt. I have been shouting this from the mountaintops, the high-tops, the converse all-stars and the steel guitars in summer-wet meadows. Where is the knowing, when is the certainty? Looking for a different day, I find this one staying in its place, chasing other numbers from the calendar. Stay summer, find another season to replace those months we cannot face alone and the times that home seems like somewhere other than where we are. I would like to write about questions for which we already have the answers, or think we know, but are afraid to ask. I would like to write about how hard it is to be really awake, to take the cake and eat it every day, to play the fool and to rule from the throne in the same zone with alarming frequency. We please ourselves, we drink to our healths, we contemplate wealth on the distant horizon, but it’s never surprising when tragedy strikes. It’s a plot device, it’s character development, it’s life in a more dramatic sense. We can tensely watch the sky for the other shoe to drop, we can not plant our crops for fear they won’t get harvested, just devastated instead, or we can just slouch on each day’s couch, knowing that we’ll die tomorrow, and drown in the sorrow of our own loss. We toss aside the wise suggestions, we learn only our own lessons. Who can tell us what to do but ourselves? Who can know our pains, who can measure our gains? Surely, when we’re gone, our names will be remembered. We’ll have tender-eyed women speak these syllables with mouths full of tears and joy. We can plan our funerals, or we can live our lives. Striving for arriving means never getting there. Stare in the mirror, bake clearer cakes. I would like to write about writing things that don’t make sense. I’m too tense about this to miss the chance to say something, but there’s no one here to say it to and I can’t brew myself another cup of it. We fit our hands into gloves and we clap more quietly. When writing is in the plural form we can be not just ourselves. You stand beside and hide those flaws with an arm around our shoulders. We are older than our bodies and younger than our ideas. We have ideals that steal our time and invest it in flippancy. We can not take ourselves seriously enough. We are looking for tattoos to use to introduce ourselves. Pleased to meet you. I am see-through. Clearly she/he knows. Clearly we’ve gone through this before. Clearly fear steers. Clearly rejection is a method of protection. No one sleeps at night. No one wrongs the right. If we lived in novels we wouldn’t have to solve our own problems.