The Young Writer

Prompt: Writing everything down


When he started, he couldn't stop.
He wrote everything down.
Words that people gave him,
interactions from books and movies,
stories of the girl who couldn't keep her pants up,
the neighbor who cheated on his wife and left town.
He wrote down things that disgusted him,
enticed him, made him curious,
he sat in his bed on mornings when he hated himself,
didn't talk to friends at dinner,
read good books so he could steal ideas,
forgot to call his family,
and he wrote everything down.

His fingers, working to hold a pencil,
grew tired or unresponsive.
His eyes, gentle wanderers,
were heavy, pulling his head down toward the earth.
He knew people very well:
What about them was unavoidable,
their undesirable characteristics,
their fatal flaws.
He wrote about them, moved their bodies,
watched them fail time after time
inside the worlds that he mirrored from ours.
He wrote everything down,
scenes emerging and dissipating.
He read the best and wrote the best.
When someone stopped to listen, he spoke.
What sounds escaped his mouth -
of lofty towers and enlightenment.

That was not what he meant.
He bottled their reactions,
thought of Joyce, thought of Salinger, of every high-school tortured soul
who felt their wings, still wet from metamorphosis,
still stunted by the weight of gravity's authority,
dulled from the humidity of society.
He wrote this down.

March 9