I am a writer because I write.
I am a writer because I swallow the moonrise.
I am a writer because I inhale language exhale poetry.
I am a writer because I need to be.
I am a writer because every time a person speaks I am thinking not about the words they speak but about how the words they speak reflect who they are, and how who they are is reflected in their words.
I am a writer because I believe in rhetoric, the simplest rearrangement of voice from passive to active that makes the wagon suddenly roll down the hill.
I am a writer because cheese will never ever be just cheese — there will always have to be a river of words that describe its odor, its texture, its tang, the ring of its name — and the chorus of memories the rise up over me when I taste it again, each memory its own river of textures and smells.
And I am a writer because I realized quite soon that my mother — a math teacher — did not see anything else but plastic wrapped food when she shopped for cheese.
I am a writer when I’m sleeping– my dreams refusing to be held down. Every dream is a marching band on a rampage.
I am a writer when I am walking, drawing poetry out on the sky, through the trees, stamped into the concrete ahead of me.
I am a writer when I am depressed, rolled and flattened into a ditch and powered by the low hum of radioactive disturbance from that nearby dump.
I am a writer who paints in realism, pawning my drawings on the street for those who delight at violent novelties.
I am a writer on a precipice— waiting to trip over feet and splash into a swamp of feelings — far out beyond metaphor.
I am writer who pounds away, screaming out in the neon chalk scrawled on suburban driveways, answering the questions the neighbors haven’t had the courtesy or the forethought to ask yet, and when they come banging on the door to complain I acquiesce and offer to wash it all down.
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Written during the The Writing Workshop KC, prompt #3.
