Complexity
How can this woman
pushing rudely into my
lane smile so sweetly?
Writing is communication, and communication is hard. It takes a great deal of artistry to know how to combine just the right words, phrases, and rhetorical devices to get across precisely what you mean with all its little subconscious nuances. If you are lacking in artistry, that means a great deal of painful, laboring work instead.
I like writing. I like communicating, and I like crafting those magical combinations of words that perfectly encapsulate what I mean while also being elegant and beautiful. But I am not always particularly fond of the blood, sweat, and tears often necessary for me to craft a lovely sentence. I don’t have enough grit, enough stubbornness, and enough unbreakable devotion to beauty to really be a writer. Anybody who does has my deep respect.
So I do write, and I try to get better at the craft. Papers and articles for school and for this website let me dive into subjects I love and perhaps help others catch my passion for them. Short stories, novels, and the occasional poem let me work through subtler things and capture experiences that are more than what they seem on the surface, exploring the implications of ideas and people’s true natures and personalities. But, as I said, I lack the nerve and the commitment to pursue writing very seriously right now or try to publish anything. For now, I mostly use writing for my own benefit, to help me think through things and express experiences.
Here you can find some of my essays and papers, short stories, and poetry. The essays and papers are generally philosophical, sometimes written for school, sometimes not. The short stories are all fantasy, concerned with characters and their worldviews and attempting to use the strange outside trappings of a fantasy world to illuminate internal worlds. The poetry is mostly old stuff I wrote before I realized that I didn’t actually read poetry that often and thus I didn’t know how to write it. I do still occasionally write a poem if I want to put something into words that is too elusive, emotional, or subconscious for my prose.
How can this woman
pushing rudely into my
lane smile so sweetly?
This poem sounds best when read aloud.
season’s last strawberries:
slightly sour,
but precious in their coming absence
Unrelenting time
sounds mild when it merely
ticks.
Sound also follows
the law of supply and demand:
when there is little, every sound
is loud, clear, detailed, valued, expensive;
when there is much, every sound
is lost, soft, fuzzy, annoying, cheap;
a fan whirring in a storm of electronic buzz
is just another distraction, earsore,
but a fan whirring in a silent room
is a rhythmic lilt of wind.
sound of a bullet
fired makes me realize the
softness of my flesh
Muffins that would not
rise, now in the trash, fill the
room with sweet fragrance.
Light from passing cars
sparkles & reflects off trash
like sun on fresh snow
Look! look!
the stars forget to fade as the sun came out,
and they have melted and fallen into the grass!
Waves splashing and whirling and tumbling
over and into and onto themselves
a swirl of froth falling forwards and backwards
crashing over each other again.
Strange to think –
that tiny blue marble
rolled in barely perceptible clouds
is a whole world –
suspended in a huge starry void
of empty, silent planets –
a whole world, with all its history and knowledge and technology –
small and still
shrinking to yet another tiny star
in an endless sky.