Embracing my cringe

[Embarrassing]

Francisco Goya, El sueño de la razón produce monstruos, c. 1799

This is the first time anyone has said it, and I’m very brave to say so: Creativity is unpredictable. Even when it visits us, we aren’t always in a state to make our inspiration legible. Much of the last year has kept me out of flow, but a few sustaining relationships and communing with fellow writers has kept me from abandoning ship, creatively speaking. Hence my re-apparition to you now.

Surrendering has never come naturally to me. Germane to this context, I find myself consistently foiled by my attempts to regiment my creative writing practice. The more I try to house break it, the more it pees on me. I even refuse to surrender to the difficulty of surrendering.

Carson McCullers was 23 when she wrote The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. I read it at age 19 and gave myself four years to accomplish a feat of similar magnitude. Apart from the inherent cringe of this presumptuousness and the matter of the incomparability of my life to Ms. McCullers’s, there is evidence of an enduring self-flagellating impulse that my therapist and I are both very tired of dealing with. I suspect it comes from the contingent state of my self-acceptance (a.k.a. perfectionism). If I can’t do everything, then I’ve done nothing. If I haven’t done the best, then I’ve embarrassed myself. I smell the rot in these ingrained beliefs. This is an attempt to air it out a bit.

In a conversation I had just a few minutes ago, it was suggested that I might try to find inspiration in good feelings instead of bad ones. “I don’t know. I’m not Rumi,” I replied. If I haven’t done the best then I’ve embarrassed myself. Ugh! Cringe!

I’m not quite ready to accept love as creative inspiration - at least not happy love. In the meantime, I will warm myself with the reliable fuels of frustration, angst, and melancholy. To that effect, I’m sharing a couple of poems I’ve written over a year deserving of this kind of elegy.

This is a *vulnerable moment for me* because, other than a very informal reading I gave at a friends’ (very kind and tender) open mic one time, I haven’t widely shared my poetry. It’s not Rumi but I like them. Maybe that’s enough.

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A burning

I’m passing the torch backward even as I run forward 
like we’re in a relay race and I am every runner of every leg, 
except we run not on a track but simply onward 
towards a bonfire on a distant summit 
where there are no Olympians, 
merely others of us who have already arrived 
signaling to those below that, yes, 
there is a destination toward which we run, yes,
we are survivors of the arduous road 
warming ourselves by the fire which calls us ever back, 
reminding us that we are beings of amorphous form, 
of nonlinear time, 
though we tend to forget carrying on as we do, 
sacrificing infinitely forking paths for the ecstasy of control, 
of rectitude, 
of a straight steel rod through curved bone 
in an act of fervid, idolatrous worship 
whose heat is merely the energy effusing from our own bodies, 
a wick and wax which know only their own consumption, 
a domestic mockery of the true fire: 
the defoliating light, 
the sacred unbearable conflagration that is our fullness 
alight in tandem with the summit fire, 
destroying us as it creates us, 
for we are ones who burn.

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Four by four

Do not fear death 
By the time you read this
You have already died one thousand times 
In one thousand ways 

Death is a friend with a key to your place
She lets herself in and calls you babe
Pours herself a bowl of cereal 
And shares the spoon with you

We are the lifecycle of a butterfly on a loop 
Infinitely precipitating ourselves from slime 
Into different states of being, let alone matter 
Fluttering irresistibly back to the place we go to die

You are practiced in the art of self-mourning
Having lost countless editions of your life  
I implore you to find a different practice 
Where we’re going, there is no self to mourn

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