Thinking Inkly: A Little Anxiety and Some Thoughts

Dear Reader,

I’ve been told that it’s difficult to always be reading poetry; that there is a great reward in finding a meaning in a poem, but that the meaning is often difficult to come by and can often make people feel stupid or lost [possibly insulted somehow] if they don’t get it. I’ve been told that it might benefit me to write some daily thoughts or record something more accessible; I don’t know. I honestly am numb to the whole idea because I have felt before that I think in a poetic way and it can confuse even me when I’m trying to work out something plain in my mind. So why wouldn’t it confuse someone else? On top of that, it feels similar writing prose and poetry, like something is somehow just crossed together, homogeneous.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately, about whether I should just be writing thoughts because it’s more accessible for people, and I don’t know how I feel about it. Do I agree? Do I disagree? Am I somewhere in between? It’s difficult to say for sure when I am so deep inside my own poems that they tend to unfold for me like tissue paper.

And I wonder what makes a thing accessible to the general population. Do they simply need to be given a version of reality that may or may not exist? Do they need to be told that something is a certain way? I don’t know. I think that if I knew the correct approach to reach them I wouldn’t be writing this stream of thought out in my blog. And I don’t know why you’re reading it, if you are, if you’ve gotten this far, I’m not sure why you kept on. The whole process, as I’ve looped back to look at it, doesn’t make any sense to me even now, I am simply lost in the process of words as they spill out and I can feel [in my own neurotic brain] how the poetic techniques that I love are starting to push at the edged of my mind. I can feel some kind of warm oozing love for the words beginning to break and tumble within the confines of this prosey space, I can see and feel them pressing their way into this piece and I am fighting it with everything that I have.

I don’t know why I would ever want to fight it. I’m damn good and something tells me that I’m a writer like wine, that people will like me better the more I age, the more that my bitterness and tannins begin to blossom, and I’m trying to just be careful. Careful that I don’t turn into vinegar. I don’t mean for this to be confusing. I’m trying to be straight forward with my thought and that’s not an apology, it’s an internal critique as I type it all out; I just want to be clear that my thought it pretty layered.

I think that most writers [as I’m pushing this metaphor along] start off as cheap wine. It’s the exceptional writers [the few] that get the good casks and are made of the right grapes, those ones that age long enough to be sold for hundreds of dollars and it’s even fewer that are sold for thousands.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this, but I do know that I want to write like a fine wine, that I want the legs of my red body to linger on the sides of your glass and I want to be dry in your mouth as you eat your medium rare steak or baked Idaho potato with butter and salt. I want to be devoured with the rest of your life.

If I were a book I would want to be the one that sits on your night stand, in the basket on top of your toilet, the one that you pack last when you move and lend out to people that you’re crushing on. I want you to feel intimate with what I have to say.

And that’s what I have for you right now. I’m not sure how this whole free write thing will go, but maybe you’ll all get to see a bit of me that you didn’t before.

Until next time,

Bryson