We writers are insane.
All of us.
We revel in our own sad mess
While picking green grapes
Off the wallpaper,
Smecking away like mad
At the wondrous juices
Of the imaginary, judicial
Forbidden Fruit.
We, like Hemingway,
Take our scotch in the morning
And our gin at night
And try with brutal, lashing effort
To make it through
Everything in-between.
We have put ourselves in shoes
We will never be able to walk in.
We must walk miles as
Linguists, as
Assassins, as
Outsiders, as
victims, as
AIDS sufferers, as
Brutalizers of women.
We must deal with their pain
As if it were housed in our own entity of being.
J.D. Salinger wrote that
His literary son, Holden,
Wore a “people-shooting” hat and
Made it **** clear that he suffered from wild
And erratic fits of overwhelming depression.
Writing from a bunker
Far from his wife, kids and home,
His stories sparked ****** in the hearts
Of already oppressed men
With “people-shooting” hats of their own.
We must toil with language;
Put it in the corner,
Love it, hate it,
Shift it and slave daily with it.
We must lose hours upon hours upon
Days of sleep
Before we find ourselves
Dangerously asleep at the wheel in front of us
In order to make the slightest change in our regular ways.
Even then,
Our handwriting only becomes sloppier
And our words,
Only fiercer.
Kaysen, alone in a psych ward
With women who slept around and
Tried to maul each other,
Wrote diligently
To try to release the the demon
Boiling the very blood inside her veins.
But demons do not disappear easily
And unfortunately,
Neither do the tortuous memories.
Even today,
They attempt to label me
With words of the disturbed.
Anxiety
Floods my synapses and neurons.
Depression
Happily urinates on my serotonin levels.
I bring myself to write
The effigy of the ******
Day by day
As my pen scratches paper
And the doctors expect razor to scratch skin
Though it never has
And never will.
Writers are psychos.
We all are.
We remain the mad, psychotic, literate monsters
Who worm our ways
Into your head.
We nestle beside your dreams and fantasies,
Waiting to strike
And tear them apart or,
If you’re lucky,
Build them up.
A woman writer named Sylvia
Once put her head in the oven
Because the writer-demons were driving her to madness
And they wouldn’t leave her be.
Handling us is a torture
Only the most eloquent and experienced reader
Could enjoy.
Love Always,
Salinger and
Plath and
Kesey and
Vonnegut and
Burgess and
King and
Sandburg and
Snicket and
Hemingway and
Palahniuk and
Kaysen and
Gaimen and
Green and
Trumbo and…
Holtry.