Inscriptions Of The Insignificant

Every time you ask me

why is it that I write,

I wish I could tell you

I write because words found me.

But a lie that heavy

needs the earth for a shoulder,

and all I have ever grown

were morsels of soil.

I wish I could tell you

I write because I love the way it feels

when what it feels

finds a way through my skin

to the skin of felled trees.

But then you'd never know

how badly I have hated writing,

how often I've wished it away

like a fever

I could sweat out by morning.

I wish I could tell you

I write because I've always wanted to,

because some things are born

already facing the sky.

But then how would you know

that I write

not because I want to,

but because I cannot not?

I write because it is the curse of my blood,

and the harder I try to wash it from my hands,

the more stubbornly the words return.

I write because my father didn't want me to.

I write because my mother didn't want me to.

I write because they burned my poems

and still could not ashen my poetry.

Some things survive fire

by becoming something fire cannot name.

I write because there were times

people walked away smiling,

leaving their little instruments of ruin

lodged somewhere between my ribs,

and I found more reasons to disappear

than to remain;

and when friends and family failed to bury me, 

words were my scalpel and spade,

my prescription and prayer.

I write because words are all that lie

between truth and lie,

and someone has to stand there

when the distance starts closing.

I write because if I didn't,

you would sell the world

every fiction of yours

and call them memories.

I write because someone has to

in a world busy

renting words for convenience,

where truth is expensive

and lies come home delivered free of cost.

Every time you ask

why is it that I write,

ask yourself:

if I didn't,

would you?

You can tell me

I'm a speck in the sand.

You wouldn't be wrong.

The sea has swallowed

better men than me.

But if I had to write

to become a bestseller,

I would become you,

and between the two of us

there would be

no tongues left unstained.

So no,

I don't write because I love writing.

I don't write because

I think the world needs another poet.

I don't even write

because I think I have something to say.

I write because silence

has always been too willing

to let the wrong people speak.

I write because somebody

has to clean the language

after the respectable have shit in it.

And if that makes me

nothing more than a speck in the sand,

so be it.

The sea can have the sand.

It can have the poets.

It can have the bestseller.

It can have every beautiful lie

ever written about why we write.

I'll take the shit.

I'll take the words

that won't wash clean.

I'll take the sentences

that leave blood under the fingernails.

I'll take the truth

that nobody wants to touch.

I write for the same reason

a sewer man cleans a commode.

Not because he loves the shit.

Because someone has to.