Tuesday 129: Invocation of the muse

Invocation of the muse


It’s my fault that ghosts don’t talk to me.
It’s not that I don’t believe
in a place between worlds,
and I’m sure my family, friends, and pets
are mostly attuned to it,
and that the dead
ones have probably tried.

I feel bad. It’s a me problem.
I couldn’t be more
blunted, even
with a nose for violence
and trouble staying asleep.

I want to see signs,
so I look for anything.

Maybe they live in these cats
I keep around.
The attitude fits.

I have innumerable original thoughts,
I just don’t think them.
A ghost is mostly economic.
You can fit her on an index card.

The muse is another story.
He’s middle aged
and I’m indifferent toward him.
He smells like a pond
and is always muttering things
like, “A garden is a failure,”
and never explaining what he means.

So you do what you do.
Give him a straw hat and he’s not so bad.
He even smiles, kisses paper, tells me
he likes my new shoes,
or about an owl
he heard once on the low
road in the park, back
when death was only death.

I used to really hate creative writing workshops in college. They made my work feel cheap, and while all of it was bad in almost every possible way, it never felt productive to have a bunch of people who were just like me, but who I didn’t really know or care about, tell me what was wrong with it.

I still don’t know how necessary the process is. Maybe it’s because foundational work in an art form so intense and varied is debateable. I read Shakespeare’s sonnets, I learned about rhyme and meter and forms like the villanelle (which had a moment in the early 2000s), but I certainly never mastered them. I know what a volta is, but does it exist, ever, in my own work, or is there just some vague shadow of its sensibility?

Now that I think about those classes, I see the point in simply being weird together, and in learning to see, value, and encourage one another’s weirdness. There’s also an important lesson to be learned in sharing your weirdness and being told it sucks. You put your soul into the work, but it isn’t yours and it isn’t you.

It’s a fumbling mess of shitty art (and ultimately, reading is more important. If you’re an aspiring writer, just read constantly, that’s my only advice), but maybe that’s the best way to go about it.