The structure for this little mixed medium étude is a little different: the first part’s got twelve syllables per line, with the third stanza featuring rhyming couplets, followed by the prose in the second part. That’s just the only way it’d work.
“The Art of Storytelling”
I.
The arrangements spell out every prickly, crumpled
inconsistency that shuffles in the hollows,
for this is how the mind works: mirrored images.
(Shhhhhhh look for me between the lines. I’m always there.)
“…there are those times, like when it’s almost too much to
awaken from your deeper slumbers to the cool,
dragged out rhythms of your own breath, like when the best
move you’ve got is to make that figure, the one pressed
up against the opposite side of the glass, run
as fast as she can in the other direction.”
II.
“Last week, I was asked to contribute a tale to a friend’s anthology – a ghost story, to be precise. I knocked it out without any hesitation, redrafted it, revised it, and handed it off to my friend with all due diligence and respect. When I presented it, I offered with it the apologetic proviso that I’d be more than happy to redraft, revise, and even reimagine it entirely so that it suited the artistic purposes of him who requested it.”
“He told me that as long as I was happy with it, it would suit him.”
“I replied that I was not happy with the work at all. I found the story itself to be a rather grim protraction of what was going on inside my head. The metaphors I’d layered within it were far from pleasing, for they’d served as an expression of the biochemically-inspired and situationally-catalyzed depressive episode that’s been occupying my head. Everything within the story had served as a means by which to work through that particular sadness, so that when I was ready to submit it, it struck me as an opus that I wasn’t happy with at all because of what it represented, even though I was the only one who knew what it meant. But it was honest work, for it came from within and was the best use of the billowy darkness within, and for that, I could be proud.”
They say you should write what you know. The phrase, taken at face value, is most often cited by unimaginative writers as an excuse to mire their work in the mundanity and profane self-absorption of everyday life. Whoever coined it bartered meaning for brevity and lost its matter, for the phrase really ought to express that when it comes right down to it, it’s unavoidable to write about anything other than whatever you’re trying to work out in your head, maybe even forgive yourself for. The most you can do when perpetrating such unintentional nakedness is to embrace the process for what it is: write down the barest truth of what you know.
♥ EAB