Artistic Distemperment

a writer pours water
into his story;
he keeps his head above it
but drowns the reader
in his stead

Storytelling

purple crocuses
crowd around oak tree
rapt children

Reading

the mind on a journey
as the body sits still;
feasting on words
while fasting

Downtime

tea and good books
are meant to be savored —
a lazy day’s agenda

Ifs and Buts

My greatest advisors
through a lonely childhood
have always been books,
but now I find their ideals
have too many exceptions.

[Fiction] The Lists

The problem with online booklists, Lissel thought, was that they made you conscious about not only what other people were reading, but how fast they were doing so, and how many friends had decided to discuss their literary aspirations with them. A place that fostered nerdish fraternity, a niche for the language-inclined, became a comparison chart. And it became increasingly distressing, downright mortifying, to know that a book, well-loved, and well-lauded (in no less than an average of 5 out of 5 stars!) by the mass public made one yawn and want to hang oneself. There was persecution and then there was willing self-immolation, and Lissel was through with both. She couldn’t quite chuck her laptop in the trash though, and so resigned herself to peeping between her fingers if she happened to (accidentally, I assure you!) land on anything remotely related to the Lists.

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Ravenous

feed me
your expressions
and thoughts

ideas that shake your heart
and grow, threadlike

Cancerous

in spite of it

Writing Bibliophiles Love to Lie

Your attention please.

This is NOT going to be an ode to Books.
In Books, I mean all books in General
That Writers mistakenly wax poetically about
As if they were one big happy family.

Let me tell you now —
Writers are prejudiced people
And happy families without drama
Are BORING.

You wouldn’t read that, now would you?

So among the Books, we have our biases and our darlings
That nasty one that reminds us of our childhood bully
The one we never got over (so we find someone just like them)
And the monster that we make the sign of evil against —
Warding off WRITER’S BLOCK happens more often than you think.

We also pay lip-service to the CLASSICS
Because the CLASSICS are the literary Intelligentsia
And if we disagreed we would be branded stupid
Because only dumb illiterates revolt against the Intelligentsia
And the Freemasons, but that’s another story.

Some of us don’t even like to read very much
But we write leaps better when we do
So we brainwash ourselves into loving every tome, encyclopedia, and treatise.
The greatest of us learn to embrace the YELLOW PAGES.
It’s an ongoing effort, so we sometimes say these things aloud.
(To better hear ourselves. Because we have EGOS, although we pretend we don’t.)

It’s always a lark when our readers believe us.

Keeping Up Appearances

One day, a writer-friend told me
People will leave
Their iLibraries open
Swap iPhones on greeting
As if exchange handshakes.
And akin, to the dust-covered dens
Of solipsistic, educated folk,
Nary a book will ever have been read.

Literary Appetite

My favorite thirst is the thirst for words
A turn of phrase as succulent as a peach
An image, silk threads glistening in a tapestry
A story on feathered wings and flight for the mind
To be hungry and to be fed;
There is no greater joy