one step forward, two steps back
There is no such thing as writer's block. I always have something to say, something in my "teeming brain" that needs to come out. What we call writer's block is an inability to articulate the things in our cerebellums. Each poem is blood from a stone. I wrote something about elbows and ankles, because no one thinks that joints are sexy. I have beautiful hands, signer's hands.
The depressive part of manic-depressive means it is time to read Virginia Woolf again. The Voyage Out was her first novel. I cried. Maybe it was because the main character's name was Rachel and when she found love she died. Maybe it was because Evelyn spent the whole novel being proposed to and was never able to make up her mind. Today I am going to finally use my giftcard to buy Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I need to get immersed in a book again. I need to write again.
In these downturns everything is an obstacle. When I don't have enough money to pay my phone bill, it means I don't have enough money to ever go to Tahiti or Japan. Sometimes when I say the names of faraway places it is as if I am making them real, creating them in my little bedroom in Dubuque. I put Ecuador in my elbows-and-ankles poem just so that I could read it aloud to myself. The first year is always the hardest. Daniel went back through all of my journal entries and said that it's amazing how far I have come in my seven months here. But today I am back at the beginning: broke, frustrated, useless. Writing is the only thing I have ever been any good at, and I can't make a living at it.
Emily read my tarot for me. The first time I ever had a reading done for me was last Halloween, when I stunk of gin and thought about maybe writing my Greensboro things in a book. James did the cards for me and the end result was Completion. This cycle of cards, the obstacles were different, as was the spiritual plane, but at the end was that lovely wheel full of flowers again. Completion.
And it is spring. Williamsburg glistens in the morning and I leave my window open while I sleep. Today a sea gull on my street reminded me how close I am to the sea and the Empire State building is blue and white in honor of National Poetry Month. Soon there will be cherry blossoms in Prospect Park and we'll organize a group to go the beach in Montauk. Gd came and kissed me on the head today. It is going to be all right. I don't know how or when or why, but it is going to be all right. All the signs did not point this way for nothing. In Brooklyn I invoke the ghosts of my ancestors, and now I can wear short sleeves, and everything is going to be all right.