Sometimes I write in a journal. Other times I feel more urgency, so I go for my laptop. I want to feel the words pouring out of me and not worry about how they look or how i’m holding my pen or anything else. Words on a screen, and just words.
Now that I think about it, it’s kind of funny how much I hate e-readers, considering the way I often neglect my collection of coptic-bound notebooks. Am I a hypocrite, willing to type my words into a digital matrix and send them out to further pollute cyberspace while adamantly denying the book-ness of digitized books?
In my defense, I tend to write—here anyway—for a different medium. This kind of thing, for instance, reads like it should go on the internet. And if I want these words to mean anything to anyone other than myself, it makes sense to put them here. Maybe these words aren’t meant to be bound, and that’s where their power lies.
Poetry, on the other hand, is a different monster. Those are the words you want to feel through your hands, like the ink is your own blood, every letter a sacrificial offering, because damn it if poetry doesn’t require that kind of weight.
These are the things I think about when my mind just wanders. It always, somehow, comes back to words and what to do with them. I crave words at the same time I am filled with them—which can be truly inconvenient, as I don’t always have the means to harness them, and I don’t even always know exactly which ones they are. So here are some now, and I’m not sure where they’ll stop, because it always seems that when I start I could keep going forever.
Thoughtmoot 