Close-Up

I am ready for it
Hair to one side
Cue the flash

No wait
Come closer
It is out of kilter

Make sure you get Me right
The important parts
The laugh that resounds

The scent looking crooked
But hold it -
Avoid the eyes

Quick!
Capture my personality too
I seldom get it this right

Firework

- Katy Perry

Do you ever feel like a plastic bag
Drifting through the wind, wanting to start again?
Do you ever feel, feel so paper thin
Like a house of cards, one blow from caving in?

Do you ever feel already buried deep?
Six feet under screams but no one seems to hear a thing
Do you know that there's still a chance for you
'Cause there's a spark in you?

You just gotta ignite the light and let it shine
Just own the night like the 4th of July

'Cause baby, you're a firework
Come on, show 'em what you're worth
Make 'em go, oh
As you shoot across the sky



(Thanks Sarah!) 

Revelation

It's literally just lighted up my life and made it that much more coherent:

You know what we're all yearning for? Something that is inexplicable. And you'll say 'it's just this feeling', and you'll comment that the moods are odd and special and perfect because they just are, and you'll find that moment when everything makes sense for their senselessness.

The Lit Path

it is like a sun, you see
this tenseness in me that grows
north, west, south and east
scalding my face so that i blush

but i've been silly anyway
to think that speaking and reading and writing
could make dim that garish ray
that they could ever be my salvation

you must see, the prose i write
are poems stretched out to make sense
i skitter up words that take me aflight
then have to tolerate that strange suspense

it doesn't solve things, it is simply
a self-absorbing indulgence
this escape from the gritty
this highly priced disappointment

As a Reader

Was at Costa (it's this little chain cafe in the UK) earlier and watching a little girl read her book by the window seat. Made me think of how I used to get so engrossed in a book that I'd feel like I was in another world.

It doesn't happen anymore though. I wonder if it's because I've gotten impatient, or if every story seems to be a repeat of another. I want to say it's because I haven't got time, but it seems too easy an excuse. I find myself making little side notes of the writer's technique, musing over the subtle clues and insights to life, and then skimming through the rest of the book after 'Preface'.

I wonder if it makes me any lesser as Writer when I don't do Reader right.

I'm very comfortable with my style of writing. It's a descriptive sort of prose, more of emotion than of places and sounds and sights, more metaphor than surface value. I like it, love it, enjoy writing and reading this particular style, but I'm beginning to find it very limiting. I'd like to try out simple, factual, teasing writing that doesn't hint at earth-shattering epiphanies. I'd like to try out simple sentences, without commas, each five words long. I need a new angle. Something really new. And fresh.

Hm. Looks like I've just found what I can do. 

In terms of my writing, I am currently in this search for precise words. Words that don't just give a glimpse of what I mean, but are what I mean. Phrases pieced together for both their beauty and political correctness. In short, I am becoming like all the other Literature-ists who become too critical of language, who cut the language apart and seem to overlook the very banal perspective that language can be, above all, merely a language.

See? I'm even finding trouble with that last sentence. Bah.

Right now. In a nutshell.

Grief

I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless;
That only men incredulous of despair,
Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air
Beat upwards to God’s throne in loud access
Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness
In souls, as countries, lieth silent-bare
Under the blanching, vertical eye-glare
Of the absolute Heavens. Deep-hearted man, express
Grief for thy Dead in silence like to death:
Most like a monumnetal statue set
In everlasting watch and moveless woe,
Till itself crumble to the dust beneath.
Touch it: the marble eyelids are not wet;
If it could weep, it could arise and go.


Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

TC

Do not underestimate what it means to take care of yourself.

It is the hardest, most tiresome, thing to do. It is the most adult thing you can do. It is your most precious commodity. It is your best investment.