If they only knew the truth.
Because it’s always the same fucking thing.
“I love the writing!”
“You definitely have talent.”
“Is any of your work about me?”
Fleeting praise I once admittedly loved. But that now makes my stomach churn. Because it’s just superficial flattery pushing a jet-blasted brain into recoil mode. More hollow compliments masterfully baiting all the caged demons to collapse into their liquid howls of disgust.
It makes me want to rage and lash out. Scream the indignity of my discursive curse. And ultimately embrace the anonymity of my more vulpes nature.
Because no one ever fucking acknowledges the cost. Or the exhausting burden of investment required to put something meaningful on paper—I am terrified of a blank page.
Because it’s too clean.
And I was born bathed into a world of dirty things.
They will never understand the obligation of being that guy. The one who hears everything. And compulsively observes the subtlety of gesture. All the ones that most other people miss.
Obsessively collecting the nuances of broken, beautiful characters. And then shuffling them into a semblance of coherence to better define the encounter. Giving a permanent home to all those fleeting vignettes of life—the snippets of conversation; the glimpses of humanity that most others overlook.
The actual art springs from marrying those collections to the music of language. Building the first tease of the story. Setting the hook. Triggering connection to fundamental similarities. Exploring, and then exploiting, experience. Simply to force hard tears to flow. Or to make soft panties wet.
Anything to break through the boundaries of reaction.
A self-proclaimed literary bad boy. The one burning through bottles. And relationships. Tearing up pages; puking in bottles. Pissing off of bridges, when not sleeping beside rotten rivers.
Pinballing down alleyways lined in broken Old Town brick. Sacrificing the morning amongst a panicked haze. Forever tracking down a misplaced wallet. Or an over-abused debit card. The one too often embarrassingly abandoned in the flip side haze of another 517 last call.
Bloody knuckles; bruised flesh. Unfocused fingers swiping the same apologetic crap into the face of a battered phone. The one mirroring the state of its owner—because we’re both battling to hold some semblance of a charge.
Clouded moments spent wondering what caused the newest cracks. The ones on the screen. And my stability. Baffled at all the cigarette burns. And the persistent stench of decay. Wondering where the fuck my underwear went. Again. Confused as to why the things that used to work no longer function properly.
I guess it is just my destiny to break things—anything for the sake of forcing forward that ridiculous narrative.
The lessons are clear; the reckoning is unmistakable.
Stay the fuck in school, kids. And never allow yourself to get into fistfights with airplanes.
Or bottles.
Most importantly, never become a writer.
This way lies only madness.
And the numerous fading beats, of too fucking many broken hearts.
