Somewhere along the way
we forgot to tell you that
this isn’t always fun,
that writing, like Hemingway
said, is akin to bleeding.

Apparently we forgot to mention
that, like Selby says, it doesn’t
take much to do this; it only takes
everything you have.

I know for me, more often
than I would care to admit,
I’m still writing out my horrible
fears, feelings of inadequacy,
intense depressions, memories
of fistfights in boy’s rooms of
elementary schools, middle schools
and high schools all over this city.

That **** doesn’t just go away, you know.
But, writing about it helps.
Hell, writing about anything helps,
but it’s not always fun.

Sometimes it feels like drowning in a barrel of tar.

I will never forget watching my daughters be born dead,
I will never forget seeing my wife’s puffy, tear-stained cheeks and swollen eyes,
I will never forget what I did to deal with what I saw, with how helpless
it all made me feel, how inadequate I was as a husband, as a parent, as
a partner.

I couldn’t fix any of it. I couldn’t take any of it away, but there was one thing…

I could write.
I could bleed ink.
And, I did.

I bled decibels too.
I took these notebooks full of bile,
of misery, of near insanity, to a bookshop
with a PA and a live microphone.

I used that microphone to spread my disease
as far as the soundwaves would carry it.
I wanted infection, secretion;
I wanted a ******* pandemic.

What I learned was that doing this;
writing it out, spitting it out, throwing it out
in small rooms full of people with their own stories
made my stories tangible, alive to an audience of my peers.

Going further back in time, I can recall a pretty clumsy
****** experience.

That girl, in her father’s Winnebago,
she told me that she wanted to do it just to
see if I could, and I could.
She was done with me before whatever sweat
we’d sweated had even dried.

She made me wait at the end of her driveway
for my father to pick me up.

So, when that older poet writes about
lost loves, or lovers long gone, I get it.

Because, maybe he’s writing about how sweet
and supple they were so long ago, so that he might
better be able to get a handle on the recollection of
the biting crush of loneliness that their departure brought about,
and might still live in the memory of his heart.

We write what we write.
Some of us call it poetry,
we may even reach higher
than we perhaps should,
and call it art.

But, I, and I would gather, we
know that it’s not always
a happy or enjoyable task.

It is a task of upheaval
and ultimately of survival.

It is not cute
but it is culture,
not always art,
but artful payment
to that which is painful,
pure.

*
-JBClaywell

©P&ZPublications; 2016