Biography

22 February 2010

Mama

and daddy

taught me reading,

and also my writing

when I was still little--

too little to be much good.

They didn't mind, but it took me

a couple of years to really like writing.

But reading I loved and adored and poured over

every book with beautiful pictures or (more particularly) beautiful poetry

which filled me up with such sing-song joy, it spilled over

and out my own pencil, between the blue lines of three-hole-punched paper.

And I discovered a new love for the scratch of my own thoughts

on the rough of cheap paper, the taste of my pencil between my teeth

as I carefully sampled the sounds to discover a one that could Mean more perfectly.

Luscious-- that is what language became. I pruned and weeded and watered and fertilized with metaphors.

Sometimes I mourned to waste such care on describing the transfer of valence electrons in ionic bonds,

but afterward, in the evenings, I filled up notebooks with my thoughts on love and happiness, sunshine and

warm rain. And sometimes, sometimes, I set down my clicky-pen, closed my moleskine and just loved my own life.

But what, I always ask then, is the good of basking in real life, if you never capture it with

pen and paper? And then I pick up my old, worn composition book and find some place cozy from which to

paint the view in the window of my words.