When in doubt – write about .. writing.
I am no scholar. I didn’t attend any post-secondary institutions and I haven’t read through War, Peace, Pride OR Prejudice – but I know for sure that I am absolutely head over heels and doe-eyed over the English language. Books. Poetry. You name it.
If I was in high school right now, I’d probably be teased by other kids for being some sort of brown noser. I’d have other kids wondering who paid me to say these things. But when you grow up, at a certain point, you realize that your teachers were right –ENGLISH IS COOL!
But not in the way that they used to present it to you, with chalkboards and text books and memorizing pages of things you don’t care about. English is cool NOW because your mind has developed, and you no longer really need material things to keep you entertained – words become modelling clay. For your mind. I love creative writing – the ability to string words together and create imagery and lucid representations of your own thoughts is astounding to me. I remember the first time I read Kerouac and was completely captivated by his ability to take me on cross-country journeys without taking a single step. I have never fallen out of love with Jack.
And Brautigan. His succinct, honest literary bursts.
I’m in awe by the body of work that these authors have left behind. It inspires me to keep everything I write, whether I think it’s any good or not. It has inspired me to blog. I’m almost sure that these legends I adore didn’t always love each verse written, but I am beyond grateful that their work was catapulted into the world and now, etched permanently in time.
We live in 2014, an age where many get away with using ‘ur’ in place of ‘your’ and ‘your’ when it should be ‘you’re’ – if there was an emergency room for language, we wouldn’t even have enough beds for all the injured grammar and punctuation.
Tragic.
But there is hope! Read. Write. Explore. If only to resuscitate the lost art of language. And like a fine wine, the written word only becomes richer over time, so educate yourself in the robust flavours of syntax and lyrics and rhyme and prose. And educate me! I want to know who you read, which authors or poets make your heart skip a beat.
I dug this up, circa 2008 – a straaaange time in my life – still one of my favourite things I’ve written.
A (Wander)Lustful Proposal
Traveling along the cryptic freeway, aged and cracked from thousands of dreamers chasing adrenaline coated cities for so many years prior.
Dreamers begging for exoneration from Nevada’s bleached heavens,
dreamers cutting up withered scraps of life’s reel and tossing them onto the cutting room floor,
dreamers boiling away their infectious mistakes with the scorching desert winds.
Hot steel automobiles shredding through the concrete lanes, and for each transient vehicle, a different recollection of you.
Where are you?
Why aren’t you with me in Reno?
You are slaughtering your days revising revising revising and sipping that caffeinated tar, unwavering, and I’ve made it to Reno, the city where visionaries pass through on brazen steel unicorns for reasonably priced thrills.
You say you love me, and if so, I want your eyes to look through mine – hazel and blue coalescing into radical hues and mirroring infinite portraits of Middle America.
Somehow I wish I was rising and falling with you instead of now, alongside the California coast, colliding with whisky visions and domineering Pacific waves. But oh, the diamond coast..
Please! Come with me, withstand the truest test of passion on the road, have your alabaster fingers ready for when my hair is sketched into coarse straw and my skin aches from blowing sands. Allow us to navigate through Polaroid deserts and sepia villages. Horizons will be swallowed with you, in undetectable truck stop diners, at the bottom of blank ceramic coffee mugs, with sides of American apple pastries. Breathe with me in the hotels where Kerouac tossed gallons of Jack down his throat and engraved the language of hipster cherubs onto typewriter rolls, where showers bleed rust, where alternate dimensions plead for you and I, under the lethal bedspreads.
You’ll forever be attractive and childish on our highway, the scattered yellow lines will move faster than your age and the grooves in your face will only mesmerize. Time will be sluggish and pharmaceutical; anaesthetizing that ancient (and now foreign) existence of botched Mothers and wearisome affairs and loathsome schooling, years of cluttered perplexity will be organized, then obliterated. We can cradle ourselves in travel dust and star dust, we must, we must.
We’ll push through Montana – and notice that nothing is to be feared when you’re on the road; bereavement and defeat are so far away, so far behind us and in front of us that the only thing of much worry is coming to a complete halt and having to adjust to the fact that it’s just a temporary liberty. Does it have to be temporary? Why return to the central headquarters for uncertainty? Why return home and plant our feet – just to be uprooted?
I promise, if we drive one another to insanity, we’ll spend the evening in a Western ghost town and sleep in separate saloons – we’ll awaken and crave the voyage, crave each other – you’ll crave my sporadic freckles and I’ll crave that perfectly symmetric area on your chest where I rest my head. The sunset will ultimately strike down and we’ll question how we ever were apart.
Let us always progress.
I want to be with you, towering the heights of the Montana mountains, bathing in the saccharine zephyrs of an all too courageous America.
I want to be with you in every vacant frozen establishment, its industrial crust beading with sweat from the summer’s volcanic broil.
I want to be with you, swimming in fantastic amphetamines, cradled in the seats of a Greyhound at light speed.
I want to be with you in a jazz drenched cafe, snowy boots and earthy tones, overflowing eyes and espresso kisses.
I want to be with you under the buzzing neon lights of Greenwich Village, reds and indigos reflecting off our damp lips and nostalgia tears.
Fast and hard, let us toss ourselves onto the mezzanine of our very own America, grinning as we grasp onto effervescent goblets of discount wonder – cheers! It is now our turn to perform! Bring out the modern troubadours! We aren’t well established gypsies but it is healthy to pretend. The only barriers will be the warm oceans of grain and the shameless sapphire sky – it is only natural now to follow the unfamiliar trail with frantic and passionate eyes & to travel along the cryptic freeway, aged and cracked from thousands of dreamers chasing adrenaline coated cities for so many years prior.
Which reminds me .. I should get writing again soon 🙂
