A life in pages.
As I lay in bed last night, I started writing something to help me deal with my frustration over the difficulty of creating fleshed-out characters for the various novels I’m outlining. Somehow, within two lines, it became a poem!
–
Character Study
I am a character.
I exist in sentences, breathe between fragments of symbols
laid out upon polished parchment.
My ambitions are tentative, my past abstract,
until you take this next clause and consonants
to explain my who, what, when, where, why, and how.
This is not ideal.
I would prefer to be absolute, to be able to look
around every corner of life’s labyrinth
and know how the bends curve to end.
As it stands, I walk by a torch
waved at your whim, vim lent through a passive void
blessed with meaning and being on a case-by-case basis.
A closed cover could conclude me at any
moment.
A picture, once rendered, could cast me
as an iconic beauty
or deformed doodle.
This world is not kind to the fictional, see.
You abuse us, prop us up
to promote your ends and means.
We vague infinity, the people who could be, should be, may have been,
are the scarecrows in your field of dreams,
pocketing promises like rocks as ballast
for whatever sale you set.
But page-wise, perhaps I can transcend. Already,
you feel obligated to keep writing,
keep reading.
Already you have fixed some image of who I am,
face and intonation pasted
from some old encounter like papier-mâché over a withered balloon:
A brother, a lover, a stalker, an ex-professor.
It’s said that people are only ideas
incarcerated in calcium and calories.
Yet I roam free, by virtue
of ink and imagination.
You think yourself the powerful one, but
after every book you took your words from,
every film you filched your inflections from,
every game that trained your reflexes,
and every song from which you stole your emotions,
motivation woven into heartstrings, tell me:
Who created who?
–
Notes&Sketches 