Words bubble and churn inside of me. What I start isn’t what I need to expel. Miasma leaks out my fingers, spilling amber ichor through my keyboard. If only delete could erase this feeling as well as it clears the awkward words spattered across my screen.
Tripe is what it is! All teenaged melancholy angst, more awkwardly ugly when worn in graying middle age. Write! damn you, write! Put voice to the almost audible whispers. Drag those voices out into conscious daylight and watch them flower or shrivel as they will.
Nurture them or smite them, goad them or coax them, caress them or stomp them, lose them or hold them, cup them or discard them – they don’t care, they’re only words. Write! Write! Write! Write!
Write a dungheap of words to fertilize the thoughts, never mind the smell; to the dung beetle it’s gardenia wafting on a sea breeze under the Southern Cross. Pile it high, let it sit, then dig, dig deep and pull out the coprolites and build a holy altar from those words. Light a candle, meditate, write.
Write. Write. Write.
Heather Kilbourn 