QueerlyWritten

butter by a.meadowlark on Flickr.

The Butter of Writing 

All the pretty notebooks and sexy super smooth glide pens won’t make the words appear. You can dust your computer, line up the monitor just so…stack your favorite “This is How You Write” books up to the ceiling and lay your your talismans on the muses alter: old poems, pebbles and driftwood, sage and dried flowers and your favorite pale pink beaded rosary, the old typewrite key and your favorite dried up pen.

Pictures and post cards are taped to the wall, index cards and post its in rainbow colors and your childhood, thrift store, early edition copy of Louisa May Alcott’s The Old Fashioned girl are resting on your desk along with sea shells, notes, pages torn from notebooks and the complete works of Pablo Neruda. Your carefully hidden published smut and your clean, well lit story, published in the local literary magazine still roll their eyes from their respective corners and say well?

Use whatever it takes. By all means keep the old unwashed blue button down shirt that still smells of your favorite ex who could write an essay before her first cup of coffee hanging on the back of your computer chair that slides down every time you sit on it so that your chin is too close to the desk, your eyes, miles away from the monitor. Go ahead and kiss that lucky rabbit foot, knock on wood, have a glass of cold vodka, swagger like Bukowski and flip off Hemingway. Mutter at the old dead published men, whisper to the women. Call on them in their dreams full of crisply typed poems with round smooth adjectives and blue bowls full of over ripe peaches. Dreams of dead writers are everywhere in the air if you can listen past the voices in your head- that buzz of disapproval and the sarcastic laughter of the critics sitting around the poker table smoking fat cigars and drinking bad whiskey. They are waiting for your to cross out those words in angry pen scratches or hit the backspace key so they can nod and say they were right all along.

Meanwhile, the air is full of molecules waiting to coalesce around a thought or idea, to bump up against the what comes next and the then she said while the cursor blinks at you expectantly. All of these blank pages to fill, all this room to stretch out that’s hungry for ink, waiting for words. There’s room enough for all of us to stomp around in a dead writer’s too big motorcycle boots, or favorite Jimmy Choos.

It’s all around you- the hum of it- that raw energy waiting to be ink splashed and useful.

It all boils down to dissolving the yeast in the warm water and waiting for it to bubble to life, just for you. And then the flour, carefully measured like the lines in a well written outline, or thrown in by the handful, it doesn’t matter, bread won’t care too much about what your approach is as long as you pay attention. After the mixing and the punching down and the rest, after the kneading till sweat kisses the flour on your nose and you carefully itch it with the inside of your wrist, You’ll get a loaf from the oven, hot and fragrant. Even though the loaf you are yielded might be a little raw in the middle or burnt at the edges, it will still be hot, made by your own intelligent ink stained hands. It will always belong to you even when it’s offered up at the dinner table or eaten standing around the oven on a cold morning. And if it’s a good month for groceries, you might have some butter that melts into those simple ingredients you’ve combined and then, that bite, that’s as good as it gets.

Writing won’t always be like that, hot and oozing with good butter but it will always be filling, always taste good, always be yours.