For Intentions and Meaning

If you think you are a writer, then stop.

Stop for a year, a month, a day.

And when all the words inside you begin to burn,

Marking themselves on your organs and on your breath, refrain.

Hold yourself steady, do not put pen to paper.

Do not write until an inferno rages inside your chest, until the moon threatens to burst through your skin, and you would swallow the solar system if it meant something.

Do not write until your nose begins to bleed with all the words you haven’t said,

And your fingernails break under the pressure of all the lives you are still carrying.

Do not write until you mean it, until your very existence depends on it,

When you cannot breathe, nor dream past the worlds beneath your eyelids

That haunt you with the screams of desire to be released.

Stop for as long as it takes

For that passion in your fingertips to grab you by the throat and demand your attention.

Do not write for the glory, for there is none here

None but the glory of the toiling, sweaty, sticky, smelling, agonized heart

Of one caught in the gravitational pull of the worlds they ache to capture.

This is not pretty.

But if you write, you will see the beauty of heartbreak, you will know of the gold that is formed in the hearts of dying stars.

And you will know

What the world wouldn’t be if that pain did not exist.

The pain that comes not merely from broken hearts and failed romance,

But from the broken chalice of a human soul

The agony of a joy too large to be felt in full

The fragments, fragments of life too large and too small to piece together by anything but our lungs

So if you think you are a writer, stop until you know.

Until you know that the dogs crying out are howling your agony

Sending it into the atmosphere where it will rain down on the unknowing

Their ears perked at the intonation of the silent worlds that surround you.

Until you feel the echoes of broken and mending hearts

And it shakes you, where it will resound in your bones for years to come.

Until nothing else matters, until everything you are longs for nothing else stop.

For it is only then that you will know what to write really means.