Never Fuck (With) A Writer
People want to be immortalized by writers, to be sonneted and ruminated over in villanelles and poured into the charming tchotchke of a haiku. They want heroes named after them in stories, and lyric essays composed about the lengths of their scars or the turns of their idiosyncrasies, and we are more than willing.
Writers are in love with the world, besotted with speech, seduced by sex and the way of smiles. We catch the smallest things in webs of our own weaving, delicate looking things that glisten with dew in the morning.
But at dusk, we’re hungry spiders, and we hunt.
If you come close enough to see our colors, know that we will see much more with every one of our eight eyes. We see the blessed parts and the damned. We see your tricks, and we lay our traps, and we devour you into lines that can lay you out naked and screaming while your insides turn out.
This is how we feed.
Somehow we have become romanticized. Our smoking and drinking and depressive natures have become quirks of the creative class, little vices of the lovers of words. What cannot be seen is the throat hit of the smoke that comes back in morning coughs that taste like cheap gas station swill. Our lids look seductive as they squint with too little sleep, but are reddened at the corners, and we adore each little cut.
We take the stings and aches and sloshing emptiness and spit it back in the faces of everyone who dares to look because we don’t have a choice. It’s in our marrow and to fuck a writer is to take a transplant. We’ll push and stab with hollow needles to suck out what life you’ve got, then blow back in something of our own until you’re changed, marked by daring to be seen by the shrewdest of eyes. And then, we viciously lay everything bare.
We may change your name so you’re not found out, or restrict our audience so those with knowledgeable eyes can’t read, but we put you down in print, sketch your form into ‘Wanted’ posters, and set it loose.
If you’re paying attention, you’ll find yourself.
While our flesh may be soft, and our blissed out exhalations inviting, beneath, there is nothing but crystalized calcium — a skeleton strengthened by the keystones in the arches of unbroken bones. Our eyes are visible, watchful, and wide, but you don’t see how they mind your every movement like a mother with naughty children; your thoughts are between our knees. Meanwhile, we sharpen our nails on the length of your spine, exposing the pointed nibs of lead with which we’ll later write.
And so we advise: never fuck with a writer — else you’ll find yourself carved with pretty, glinting knives, boiled cruelly down to an appetizing essence, and served on a platter of silver tongues.
