"Love Is The Tired Symphony You Hum When You're Awake" or "Yes, Lenny, The Rabbits. The Rabbits."

I really wish I wrote more. I used to fill notebooks from margin to binding, full of poetry I had faith in, fiction that I wrote myself into, and nonfiction that I tried my best to write myself out of. I found security and safety in the sea of a blank page, those light blue lines shaking on the paper in anticipation of words and allusions, literary devices, metaphors about highways and track marks and boys with calloused fingers from guitar strings and holding too much weight.

I have shelves and boxes of notebooks. Full of the days where I couldn't get you out of my head, where I couldn't get you out of my veins, back when I thought about nothing else. Notebooks about school, notebooks about poems and people without souls and songs that I heard and loved and teachers that I learned from. I have notebooks full of my sister, full of instant messages, text messages, emails, taped together photographs and pictures from magazines that I stuck between the pages with glue sticks because the girl in the ad had the most amazing eyes. I can't fit all of my notebooks on one bookshelf. Kat Wood understands this.

These days my writing lives in email boxes, microsoft word compositions, my cell phone's outbox. I haven't turned out pages upon pages of beautiful simplicity when I've been reading too much Hemingway, flowery stream-of-consciousness after 56 pages of Faulkner, wistful songs about blonde hair when I've got Fitzgerald in my head. I haven't been writing short, heavy sentences about war when I've had O'Brien echoing in my lungs, or conversations full of innuendo when I've had Bukowski on my table and a beer in my hand. Writing full of tears after a night of Steinbeck, tattoos after a night of Fitch, long legs and snowstorms after Atwood, train tracks and fires after Bradbury. I need more nights where I spend my hours with authors, and not my own head. My own head is not providing inspiration.

My hands itch with my addiction to words, and it's about time I found some kid in a back alley with a couple of good, fresh grams of poetry that wakes you up at night, a bag of sentences that make you close your eyes and hold it there for a minute, and maybe just one dose of words Shakespeare invented and don't get used enough.

That sounds like a beautiful night.

"Fitzgerald's green light is haunting me,
Hemingway's bullet I hear,
and Faulkner is handing me Jim Bean on ice,
and I can't turn a deaf ear.

If writer's mistakes were meant for them,
if that's what made them good,
then I'll take a break, and make every mistake,
every writer should."

<3gen