Angsty

When I was in High School I would stay up late at night writing bad poetry.  I have hard copies of the poems I wrote.  Some nights I would write one or two, and sometimes as many as six.  That frenzy of emotionally charged, narcissistic, literary vomit lasted about three or four months.  There are a lot of really bad poems.  Probably 25 or 30 pages.  I reread some of it and it either made very little sense, or just embarrassed me.  Most of it, anyway.  I keep the things I wrote in a big file box in the top of my closet where it gathers dust.  I should probably purge a lot of it, but the truth is that I can't bear to throw it out.

Part of me likes Angsty Chara.  She was a little disciplined and a lot sensitive.  Part of me is embarrassed by her complete lack of awareness of just how angsty she was.  I wish, though, that I had the kind of discipline that she had.  Why don't I sit down and write for half an hour every night?

I was reading Neil Gaiman's blog tonight.  He interviewed Stephen King and posted the full interview on his blog for all to read.  It was for an article in the UK's Sunday Times Magazine.  (That's a conversation that I would love to have been able to sit in on.)  The beginning of the article says this:

“I think the most important thing I learned from Stephen King I learned as a teenager, reading King's book of essays on horror and on writing, Danse Macabre. In there he points out that if you just write a page a day, just 300 words, at the end of a year you'd have a novel. It was immensely reassuring - suddenly something huge and impossible became strangely easy. As an adult, it's how I've written books I haven't had the time to write, like my children's novel Coraline.”

300 words a day would make a novel?  Stephen King write between 1200 and 1500 words a day, which is fitting, because his novels are about 3 or 4 times as long as anyone else's.  I could write 300 words a day.  Mr. Gaiman is right.  It does make something huge and impossible, suddenly quite easy.  

If Angsty Chara could write in such a disciplined manner, surely this Chara could do it too?  In celebration of Angsty Chara, I will share this poem:

Pale Stones

Thinking of you, 

Like a pale stone in my mind.

Always present, heavy, 

Because I love you, 

And I find that I

Am unable to relieve myself

Of the burden of your memory, 

Of your smile,

Of your music.

Your words, 

Like notes

From the strumming

Of my heart strings. 

Are repeating themselves,

Always, in my mind. 

Tell me about yourself.

Tell me who you are. 

Tell me if my memory

Is like a pale stone in your mind.