09.20.2008 - 9:33 a.m.

I brought a notebook to work today, an old spiral five-subject with several subjects already written through. I was hoping to get myself unstuck by writing longhand instead of trying to type.

I hadn't realized it was a notebook from an old poetry workshop, where I wrote things like so:

Nothing I've ever screamed at him or anyone else has ever come out of my mouth. And it's even worse in kitchen light, that stark stab that freezes everything--nothing has the guts to fucking move. So I'll move. I'll send you night thoughts after daydreams, after poems I don't remember, after the person I am in the dark. But I'll remember above all that that nothing is real until dawn breaks over it. Dawn breaks everything I've ever been, which is only is as it should be. So for now, there's nothing but the kitchen light taking over the windows, nothing outside but the backward half of the hall. But I can hear tires across counties, I can hear the thoughts across breath. I can hear the tide, far away. You know the Pacific looks exactly like the Atlantic, except for knowing that it's bigger.

Unpolished, certainly. But more alive than most things I've written in recent memory. Possibly because I, too, was more alive in 2004--or at least, more willing to fight for it.

-stonebridge

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