©2006 – Allen Sutterfield
Thoughts of actually beginning a novel -
Reader, I’ll call it. An autobiographical fantasy (and learn how to type while you are at it.). If only I could. Write, that is. I can’t even write a letter, how can I write a novel? Here I am writing on the back of pages written months ago, and what is on the other side” Bunch of quotes from a novel! That’s me all over, Readetr. As close as I8ll ever get perhaps ( that’s I’ll, not I8ll ), goddamn but the energies are fierce this present.
A mouth tomorrow
devouring you
cause I don’t see you
I’d always goof it, like that, love poem getting in the way, instead of the really straight book, maybe a story even, I want to write, and then I’d double the jeopardy by saying I didn’t have any choice in the matter, which you are never supposed to say, especially if its true. But I can’t fool me that easily anymore and so I can only say I admire the stick to it craftsman national anthem of Completed Projects and disciplined honing of crude wood never lost sight of, else you can’t hone at all. So it’s an anti-writing writing I’d be for but unable to do, since I’m only a reader and not the writer I often fancy myself to be, too lazy for the real work of guiding words, I’ll just have to own up at all beginnings, no, no, just the one, that it can’t be done, what I’d like to do.
And is one never to be in charge of himself again? Or for the first time? Who can live forever between the lines? Where is there a body to steady the inconstant moon? Words flow so easy some hours, and tables rock with the weight of all that typing. But they go nowhere. Come from, go to. Go to, Go to. If you remember it’ll go down in pharaoh’s land, where some of it began. Chronicles in an old title. Someone drops a carnival of picks, running woman to his talk, he talks smoothly. How can I do it? Write the book I mean? Drift. Drift. Away from and towards the dooby self. “Don’t gild the lily!”
Words I read but it sounds like I heard them, I who never really heard anything beyond the usual things you are supposed to hear, in reading you don’t hear much, it’s a deafening exercise, impossible to talk to anyone while he’s reading ( or she’s too ) and if the reader’s always reading? There you are, or rather, there I am. Reader. What a fate. And discovered too early, rather than too late, for if I’d discovered it later, sing “ When I’m 64”, then it would have been too late to worry about it, if you wake late enough in the dream it doesn’t matter …as much. You’d still like to know how it would have worked our that way, but a good long rest is a positive pleasure, enough to make it alright that you have to get up afterall just when you thought you’d settled in for good. So you wake up at 64 or 76 or 89 or way up there at the century mark itself and you say, I’ll be damned! I’ve been asleep my whole life! But what a dream! Hmmmnn. No chance of getting back into it now, though. Rude awakening? No, no, it was gentle enough, now that it’s over and I’m up on my feet scratching my balls in the early morning sun since it seems I didn’t sleep with any clothes on, thank god. I would have wanted it that way, raw I mean, in the good old naked sense of the word. A hundred years old! Might as well have been a day, now I’m awake. But I am only 38, not even that, it’s my 38th summer, or should I say it was my 38th when I awoke? It’s such an awkward age, to wake up as I mean, because you are not yet old, old enough to have had the good bad long dream, and you are not young enough for it to be only one more beginning, the way it used to be, in the dream. No, you might have known it, you’re just 38 years, or not even that, and there’s nothing can be done about it, you’re up out of bed, there’s the curtainless window, one of three in your room, a bay jutting out into every day, the old cock stands up, rising to the sun’s occasion. though it shrinks down quickly enough once you hit the john. and there you go, your whole life has been reading! Read Your life Away! And all you can do is take a leak when you wake up at the fact.
Is love a project?
Is it even a question?
Is the world itself still possible?
What did happen to it anyway?
Or are these glass splinters all over my crushed body evidence of some beginning fall through a skylight?
...round smug hips in her fading jeans I still get a stir per sterns but alas, no assifaction. Joyce was the name of a cousin before I learned to read.
The reader is always in a dream, he reads his own life as he reads books and he never really knows if what he’s doing any moment is not merely something he’s reading sitting or lying somewhere in a book. For reading is the civilized cunt from which the modern sensibility—isolated in at least one case, gentle reader—keeps trying to be born, or extract itself in some other fashion. Though in words the reader tells himself it’s to get himself into a cunt I am trying for. in stopping reading. The other half is, turn it into (return it to) experience.
…blue as robin’s egg, the turning mind
in and out of world, and words…
Afterall promotion is the linch pin and Ed’s Big Machine, and there are a few handfuls of words to stuff down glib craws always yerking for grainy tidbits. Caricature act. Then there’s always a love story to read as well.
I don’t know.
It all seems possible, this minute, may stay so long as I stay here in the New Harmony Bar but my beer’s been drunk and it be time to pay pee and mosey, ‘scuse me.
“Where you comin’ off from?”
“Just south of nubbin’, little lady, if you must know. And yourself?”
Sex in April gales of snow and chill.
Against a tree in the park, in the dark.
