Writing is the Residue

I want to write about what’s real.

I want to pound meaning, and heart and rage into the blank page.

I want to write the raw profane absurdity that’s life, and all of it’s displeasure — occasionally bloomed pleasures into the fucking page.

I want to do away with the pretentious prose, and expensive adjectives.

So here I am, here I am trying.

I woke up yesterday, the sun hadn’t risen, the sky was black, hung with stars that’d died long ago — still emanating a collective soft glow. It was 4–5 in the morning, my head was resting on my keyboard, and there was bottle of beer half consumed with my left hand unconsciously clenched around the bottle’s base. There was the floral painted lighter looking as if it had held purpose and worth tucked in my right palm, and a cigarette situated between the screen and the keys I’d considered smoking for inspiration when the thoughts wouldn’t fucking flow.

I woke like that, I woke to that mess of writer’s lubricants, and it was funny, and a fucked kind of cliché. I could remember half of what I’d written the night prior, and I laughed at that.

I laughed, and the pitched manic insanity bounced off the walls of the hallway just outside my door practically waking my roommate across the hall dreaming equations, and post graduation financial security fostered from within the white walls of a lab where diseases are occasionally cured and life is the logic of a balanced equation.

It was encouraging, waking up like that, and I’m not sure why I felt encouraged.

I’d woken up, drained, the residue of last night staring back at me, cast 12 point black font, and I had every desire to continue ~ fuck sleep, and write until class, or coffee, or a sleep that’d leave me more tired than I was before falling into its graces.

This last week I’ve taken to Medium to tell my stories (sometimes half true, sometimes not at all, sometimes plain truth) with aims to find my voice. Yes, I’ve taken to Medium with these grand, foolish, hopelessly hopeful aims to find a voice.

To find a voice, my voice that’ll hold readers immersed, cradle readers in chaos that’s both beautiful and hurts like hell, and encourage readers to feel something; hate, love, war, peace, sense, listlessness, something, disgust, desire.

Feel anything.

And now a story that takes place outside the desk, the screen with its page and blank expression, the house with it’s mundanely, predictable security, and stage of laughably, ineffective writing lubricants.

I’m thinking about last Wednesday.

I was following a young woman down the shadowed trail of an ambiguous text, and I was half-drunk at a brewery that was filled with men old enough to be grandpas and prophets, scraggly enough to be homeless or careless or both, and plenty of bottles always filled so that they were always spilled with blissful ignorance surrounded us.

I drank a few pints of dark beer that tasted of chocolate, coffee grinds, and bitter caramel. Then, I drank a few more pints of amber beer that tasted of earthy gardens or sweet caramels and definitely grassy biscuits. Then, I drank a few pints of pale gold beer that tasted just all right, somewhere in between good and bad.

Then I pulled myself up from my stool, traced heavy aimless footsteps towards fresh air that seeped through the entrance and I stepped outside into the night.

I furrowed, and dug into the deep corners of my coat pockets that were pleasantly warm, shielded from the chilled winds, and unforgiving breaths of mid-winter and I pulled my hand back out with pack of cigarettes in tow.

Then I smoked one cigarette alone, thought about nothing, and then shared a second smoke with a homeless man that lived underneath a streetlight where rain was endless, and the warmth of a smiling soul was forever no more.

The man’s face hung loose, his eyes were slitted intense, cat-like with sadness like he might need to weep at any moment, and his teeth had rotted, and crumbled away long ago alongside the burning pillars of an Ancient Rome leaving a smile that was gums, purple veins, and pale yellow calcified dustings where his teeth had once been.

He was leaning against death, and just nights away from riding the burning chariots south of heaven, for hell’s waters. I pitied him, and I loved him for no reason other than his glaring, self-inflicted unhappiness. He was bare to the world as a product of his forlorn mistakes, and reckless practices and he was broken under the scrutiny of all who studied, looked, and glanced him.

The world, with its faces and their judgments was out of focus, and it was a blindly ignorant, aggressive passing season of bliss that’d run ‘till sunrise if I were lucky.

I shook the man’s hand; it was smooth and dry, and tarnished like the spirit of captain in his ship lost at sea, in pursuit of a treasure that was on land — within his home, wearing a face that looked with eyes of love all along.

I bid the man farewell, saw his eyes flash red as if the devil were standing in his place, and I hopped a bus to another side of town for another story, or another beer.