Writing Life
Stone-heavy, it bows its branch to the black
earth. Oxidized blood brown
hints at a cheering red which might have been.
Striated. Scuffed like shoe leather
worn away from starving children’s toes
clenching and unclenching the kilometers
of an August death march.
-M.
I reached down to play and forgot how it went
this piece I wrote when I wanted to be a composer.
All I could play then was Clementi’s sonatinas
so a sonatina is what I wrote and noted
In the style of Clementi to give the unintentionally pedantic
arpeggios some gravitas.
It was easy enough then for my fingers to churn
on the left hand and twiddle on the right.
But now, silent stacks of sheet music behind me,
leaning towers of dog-eared Film Score Monthly,
my battered mind turns her back on the fingers that long
for the old twiddle and churn
back when the books held more hope than silverfish,
when the room used to be bright,
when the piano was only a little out of tune.
-M.
My one beauty
my one pure thing,
I can’t heal you.
I can’t.
The fever’s in your girlish mind.
My hands fail me—
are clawed up by morning.
There is nothing I can hold
through the night.
I have been there before.
Let me focus on my wine,
plying lust.
Play along with me.
Let me hurt you a little more.
Crawl down here with me,
willing.
I’ve given up the face of God.
Yours will do.
Let me scour the trusting flesh
from your cheeks
with stony grave dirt
and self-prophecy.
Rub your nose in it—
cologne
and your blossoming body
of sorrows
still heady in my clothes.
Your scent is changed now.
Woman,
let me thrust into your hands
wet loam and loathing
rotting limp leaves and spoil.
Make glory of them for me
I beg you—
it is all I have left as a man.
You have been a guiding light
and I will never
let you
leave me.
-M.
I wrote poetry about
jazz long before I
earned it, listened to or
liked it.
Now I
purr and deliquesce—
can’t consume enough.
The god of jazz, whichever slinky
Power he may be punishes
my ears by
insatiable hunger, my
dissonant heart by
terminal syncopation.
-M.
I have indulged too much in black cigarettes. I have indulged too much in telling the story of how they remind me of a happier time.
Me, smoking them in autumn outside my favorite place on Earth, Cafe Coco in Nashville; cold wrought iron table; purple scarf from Thailand wrapped around my head; black and white herringbone wool coat wrapped around my body; one, fitted O. J. Simpson black leather glove on my left, non-smoking hand; my red, hard-shell computer case glowing with its white apple on the back, the white keyboard dingy with use. I wrote some good stuff out there. I made even better plans for the even better stuff I would write if I took the time I was taking smoking black cigarettes to lay words on screen.
I’ve remade my Cafe Coco the best I can in my California backyard—the only independent coffee joint I know of around here. I have an outdoor table that gets cold in the pre-dawn hour. I have little house wrens that dive-bomb the seeds I leave for them the way fat sparrows would dive-bomb Tater Tot debris at the Cafe. I have cold, over-sweet coffee. I have my computer, now hard shell purple, but with the same dingy keyboard and glowing apple. It’s too hot for the herringbone wool, but in the cold mornings I still sometimes lay the Thai scarf over my hair.
I have my black cigarettes as much as I want now, no making a trip to the special smoke shop next to the underground club with the seedy mulletted man behind the glass counter. The cigs sit easy on the shelf at the local 7-Eleven. There’s less glass in them, I can feel it in my throat. There’s less clove too. I lick the tips as ritual before I smoke and they are less sweet. Like a love affair resurrected out of necessity, some of the fire is gone. There is too much and too little. There is longing for something new with the same cold heat there once was.
I have indulged too much in my black cigarettes. I have indulged too much in telling the story of how they remind me of a happier time.
-M.
-loads gun-
Now, if all three of you will politely line up against that wall there and close your eyes…
-M.
I had a revelation once at writing summer camp for adults at the University of Iowa writers’ conference. I noticed when everybody read their short prose pieces that mine sounded nothing like theirs. But then I read mine and people were delightfully receptive. I wrote about my dad botching sun tea. “I’ll remember that melted orange plastic pitcher for a long, long time,” one of them said and the other two laughed and nodded while we walked away from class, across the stinking river, backs turned to the university art gallery that was featuring second-string Picassos and African furniture.
I realized in that moment and for the first time that maybe not sounding like everybody else is a good thing.
But that was all about prose. It was the opposite reaction in my advanced poetry class. I read the poem that won me the big hoop-dee-doo writing award only a few months earlier and the bald-asshole workshop leader who worked mostly in prisons and wrote about breast milk eroticism told me my poem had “a lot of work to do.”
He was mad at me anyway because when our class went out together at lunchtime and climbed up the interminable campus steps to forage for chi chi sandwiches, my retelling of going to a computer generated atonal concert that was held in the dark by a composer whose silver jacket buttons I was madly in love with got more laughs than his pretentious snarking about “language poets”.
My revelation stands.
-M.
You can’t force yourself to love something even if it is philosophically correct. Likewise, you can’t force yourself to not love something that is philosophically incorrect.
I am speaking here not only of foolish wanting when it comes to romantic love, but also of the writing process. If a writer were to be philosophically correct, she would love the “writing” part of writing as much as the “having written” part—the production as much as the product. But we’re all grownups and we know better. Creative inertia is a bitch. The physical act of writing is an unwieldy drudge. We know such an upright love affair was never carried on in the heart of any writer who has earnestly walked this earth.
-M.
M. N. Ashley 