[Jim Moonan]

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v2
An Accumulation of Scars


Don’t tell me, poet, your eyes are stars and your feet made of clay. Don’t tell me, reader, we are the stuff of stardust — Though we are — But that’s a red herring or some such thing that distracts me to thinking we are scars. Scars that accumulate. Healing is hard.


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Then the smarter ones descend into this doorless room and knock down my lowly thoughts. They say I haven’t thought it through, haven’t thought about it enough or in the right way. That's true. I haven’t. But neither have they. I want to suggest another way but don't. We all fall short. Some more often than others. We all go away. We all go below the floor or rise above the roof, dragging our scars with us. There is no such thing as up or down. Nothing I say needs to be said. No one needs to know what my thoughts are. People only ruin beautiful things. The roof is gone. The windows are gone. The doors are gone.


***

Oh no. I’ve put my foot in it, haven’t I? I've likely said too much. Half of what I say is meaningless. I can’t glean from what I haven’t seen. I see figuratively. I’m not thinking about what I’m saying. Tangled. Up. In blue. Daedalus be damned! Poet, come back and be cheerful. I beg you. I'm begging you.


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ORIGINAL

No this is not fiction. For now, it’s not prose poetry either. It's an orphan of form and genre. It is honest emotion contained in stems of sentences and blooming paragraphs. It's oxymoronic and contradictory and flying high without a net. It's a scar.

A Writer Rebels

“Travel and tell no one, live a true love story and tell no one, live happily and tell no one. People ruin beautiful things.” —Khalil Gibran

Sometimes I figuratively rebel by becoming completely literal. Don’t tell me, poet, that your eyes are stars and your feet made of clay. Don’t tell me, reader, that we are stardust — No wait, we are stardust — But that’s a red herring or some such thing that distracts me from being human. To think: we are stardust!
We are scars. Literally, we are becoming scars. Scars that accumulate. We don’t need anything but intuition fueled by emotion. Or vice versa. Healing is hard.


***

Then the smarter ones come in to knock down my lowly thoughts. They say I haven’t thought it through, haven’t thought about it enough or in the right way. It’s true that I haven’t, but neither have they. We all fall short; some shorter than others. We all go away. We all go down. We all rise up. There is no such thing as up or down.

Nothing I say needs to be said. No one needs to know what my thoughts are. People only ruin beautiful things.


***

Oh no. I’ve put my foot in it, haven’t I? Figurative speaking. I can’t glean from what I haven’t seen. I see figuratively. I’m literally not thinking about what I’m saying. Tangled. Up. In blue.

Daedalus be damned! Poet, reader, come back and be cheerful. I beg you.


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[John Riley]

Jim, I don't know what to say about this. I don't sense any rebellion. The issue is language turning on the writer if that's intended. When you say "Nothing I say needs to be said," which is something we all think at times, I don't see that as a writer struggling with figurative or literal language. It seems more of a struggle with what the words are supposed to convey. Yes, it is all language in the end. I don't feel that end here.

I wish I could say more, something more positive perhaps, but I feel that I'm reading thoughts about writing something, or in general before the writing begins. I don't sense any flying too close to the sun. It hasn't lifted off the ground yet.

[Jim Moonan]

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Thanks John. I do understand what you're getting at. It is probably titled wrong to begin with.

Your comments are interesting in that what you see as lacking is, in a sense, what I'm trying to convey: my writing lacks liftoff. I do a lot of running down the fairway but seldom get liftoff.

I haven't actually read it since I posted it. I remember it feeling like a confessional. Or maybe a journalistic kind of diatribe to myself on my lot in life as a writer. It might be a pity piece. It could be little more than a hodgepodge of thoughts cobbled together and given a provocative title (the title has to go).

But everything you say is good food. I may go back and work on it with your thoughts in mind. I have been posting here of late without expecting to draw much attention. It's a quiet little place for me to experiment without the spotlight that then other boards bring to a piece.

I'm glad you seek it out. It helps me more than you might expect.

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[Jim Moonan]

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Revision posted after pondering John's comments. I don't know that I've made it any clearer. It might be that it is destined to be muddled thought.

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