Lifer's Block

Last night I sat down to write a poem about myself. Our assignment for the week was to write in the style of Erica Dawson, who wrote many poems about herself for her collection Big-Eyed Afraid. Merrill-esque 3-4-4-3 a-b-b-a quatrains. Example:

I was born, Mom says, bull's eye
Parfait, without a flaw--reflex
And one repro of fine she-sex--
All lash and rock-a-bye-

Full lids looking to close,
Slim collarbone, and rosebud pout,
I'm Queen Without a Doubt
Of all hatched embryos. [from "High Heel"]

Simple, right? I thought it would be. What could possibly be easier than writing about the one person one spends every conscious and unconscious second with? As it turns out, for me, writing about pretty much anything besides that person. I couldn't do it. This is the first assignment of this semester I didn't turn in on time.

I have absolutely nothing to say about myself. Yeah right, you say, you have a blog for God's sake! But what I find myself writing about most are the things that happen to and around me; I'm a lens, transparent, colorless, projecting no image of itself. What I am only seems to come through in fragmented abstractions that don't mean much even to me after I put them down in words; I just think they do for a little while. I abhor the tyranny of tangibility to the extent that I can't get a grasp on myself anymore. I'm free! I say, of the bonds and bounds of definition! Free to explore contradiction and plumb polar opposites! It's not so much a cutting-loose as a hollowing-out, and now I'm all cone and no ice cream.

This thin skin holds a thinner man and not much else. I'll tell you how I get by: by shedding precious writing material like so much deadweight. Cut out my upbringing in a country on the other side of the world (a good 15 leaden years right there) and pretend I was born and raised in the West, like almost everyone I talk to, for ease of dialogue and daily living. Cut out all awareness of my body--which usually works pretty well, unless I'm sick or injured--it doesn't bring much fulfillment anyway. Cut out all the people who don't consistently contribute to my life in a positive way, which is most people, sadly. And all the new people whose eyes shut like doors when I talk to them. I'm just too damn smart with a priori nonsense: every possible experience is a foregone conclusion and sour grapes to them all.

Ascetics make for lousy poets. Craig Finn sure as hell isn't one.

I don't want to do anything these days; it feels like everything's no good. Science is dry. Art is petty. Both are self-indulgent. Work is unrewarding. Emotion is unfounded. Sometimes I feel sick and want to dry-heave from all the nothing I'm trying to spit out.

We workshopped our poems from last week in class today. I'd written some rather sarcastic Brit-rock angst (no, really, it referenced Morrissey) poem that was relatively witty for me. It got decent responses, but some of the other ones we read (e.g. Sarah T.) were just so rat-a-tat impactive and effortless; I used to be that scientist guy who could out-write all the Writing majors, but not anymore. From now on poets will be poets, and some of them will be damn good ones--are damn good ones--and those who made up their minds they were better at one thing than at others, and decided they needed the one and not the others, will get their reward, and I, who declared all things necessary, shall receive nothing.

I'm stuck seeing things as they are, not what they could be; seeing words as what they mean, not what they could mean. Somewhere along the line I lost my nerve.

I'm paralyzed with the overwhelming impulse to get the fuck out--not out of Johns Hopkins or Baltimore, but just out of here--tear this IV of pure vacuum from my arm and go anywhere at all, live from gas station to gas station until I've refilled on something resembling a will to live.