Just pick up the fucking pen and write.
That's all that my mentor said to me.
No sugar coating anything.
No coddling.
Just do the work.
BLEED.
But I let my head get in the way of the flow.
What if someone doesn't understand...
what if I will be judged..
what will be family think..
what if......
what if I do not wrestle with those thoughts every other second of the day.
what if I liberate myself from those scenarios.
What if I just truly let go and not give a fuck what you think about me.
No one will read my words.
They do not matter.
I do not matter.
The drop of doubt spreads inside the mind like a loose ink.
Ego oozing out of the surface.
But that is not the point why we write, create, play.
Why do we?
One of my favorite assholes who has inspired me is Charle's Bukowski. He was a lush like myself and also had such a tortured little bird inside his soul. I do not drink anymore so the whiskey courage is harder to come by with that raw adreneline of honest.
He explains in this poem why we create better than I ever could right here:
if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.
if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.
if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.
don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.
when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.
there is no other way.
and there never was.
So I am going to keep bleeding and exploding on a paper, a canvas, anything to free my soul before the song bird dies inside my vessel.
Bukoski was an asshole. So am I though. I need to accept that most artists are fucking narcissists. Yet, when he wrote, his words made him sound less of a jackass. He just became a flaw being. Just like me. Just like you. When we write you cannot see the face. You cannot see anything beside the raw emotions drizzled on the white page. There is nothing but an open opportunity to share brazenly about the truth without having to be seen. Naked reality.
How does one create a naked reality of a reality that was unreal?
I am trying to write about a month in my life that I was a missing person in Brooklyn. This small little hiccup in my life has shaped the rest of my decisions in personal and professional affairs. This one little scene is not the whole story. It is one climatic part of a sequence of traumatic mishaps. Isn't life one mishap after another that is blended with a few blissful moments in between.
So I decided I should just write what I want to write about. Maybe it will be about my childhood and how I learned that Cunt is spelled with a C and not a K (that will never not baffle me). Or I may write about house there is a song written about my virginity. Or maybe I will share some poetry in the middle of an epic love story. Either way, life is not in order. The story will not be either.
Cause that's life, my sweet dove. It doesn't stop until we stop breathing. So the story is being rewritten and reshaped as I breathe more into the now and leave the past further in the background. My mentor told me that the stories, the art I created is not just invented out of thin air.
"you have been brewing this spicy stew for a while now".
Get out of the kitchen, if you can't stand the heat.
