Another Up-too-Late

"I grow old, I grow old
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled."

Such a silly line in such a somber poem (The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, by T.S. Eliot). I love getting lines of poetry stuck in my head.

This summer I'm going to write lyrical narrative poetry about my adventures with a close friend in an old van, my experiences with dog fights, the people who have taught me music, about suicide, talking to curtains, Jules and Sarah, and that awful boyfriend from high school (it's so stupid, but he still occasionally haunts my dreams, telling me how inadequate I am, transforming me back into that self-hating martyr), about my sister and our language and singing and sidewalk lunch and driving in circles to watch the lights and lying in the grass. Snailing. I could write a poem 30 sections long about her. I want to put mundane things side by side with dark and light philosophical things.

I want to write children's stories about monsters and my friend the cebolla (onion) who plays violin. Children's stories about visiting a goblin market and how to thank house brownies without sending them away. Children's stories that teach science and magic at the same time. I want to write children's stories that do not try to hide the darkness in life. Children's stories that know monsters really do exist and people hurt each other, even the people who are supposed to protect you, and that awful things can happen to children even though they shouldn't. I want to tell them "I know. Come with me, and I'll walk you through it until you can find your own way."

I want to write young adult fiction and work on all this story dough sitting around my kitchen.

Do you know how amazing you are? How many incredible things, beautiful and dark, painful and liberating, that you constantly absorb and change, preserve, remember, and give back to the world? How valuable you are as a creature, as matter, as energy, as a human being?

Work your dough, your paint, your clay, your crinkling pages of crunched numbers.

"Let the soft animal of your body love what it loves" -Mary Oliver, Wild Geese 

Remember and believe that you are a child of the stars.