Nicotine & Ink

Nicotine is spattered on the walls of this home and really there is nothing to it. Eviction notices are on the door but the rent money is in order, and really there is nothing to it. I wonder does it mean I am dedicated to one goal if I let many other things go for a time. I have done this before. I just wonder. I must succeed. I don't know. I crave the wrong things at the wrong moments--I want sex when the world is asleep, to write while I work, food when I'm not hungry, to clean when I want to write. Things get mixed up now and then. Life gets mixed up now and then. Anger does provoke more anger, as I've been told, and if I got angry about life then my prose would get angry at me, would rebel and the ink would stop flowing altogether and the pages wouldn't matter anymore. The pages wouldn't matter any more. A statement made in the assumption that the pages ever mattered in the first place. Recently my friend wrote a poem and it said, "And I said / words never counted / yet no longer do." And so they don't and so they never do and so they never will. It is in the face of this that we write on. It is in the face of this that we carry on, knowing all the while that whatever we do is a spit in the ocean, that whatever we do will make no impact on the world in the end, that whatever we do we are just hopeless wastes. Even if we make it to the top, which the talent shown here in this very venue says to me that some of us will. Well on that matter and on that note, I am one of those I believe who'll eventually succeed because I have a passion for life and a lust for writing.

Midnight was in her eyes when I told her things were different now. She saw my smirk and I told her that life had never changed, the world was just looking a little different but was still exactly the same as it had always been.