Blocks

write a poem/write anything/doesn’t have to be a good poem/doesn’t have to be good./write about your therapist without using the word “therapist”/not because you’re ashamed/but because you have the tendency to wrap every real human interaction into a neat arrangement of metaphors/and call it love./do not write that you love her/only that sometimes you lie to her/like you’d lie to your sister

Write a story. Write anything. Doesn’t have to be a good story; doesn’t have to be good. Write a block of prose about your morning walk without mentioning the dream you escaped from (and how it felt so real your body stung as you awoke). Make nature a metaphor for your life and the seasons a metaphor for your past. Don’t write about your past, only that you’re afraid of October, as if October itself is the enemy and not the thing it contains. Write around the thing. Give the thing a backdrop but don’t color its face. Leave it unfinished. Leave it, and

months later, re-reading your poem,

realize you’ve forgotten the dream.

It’s faded: the pain of it, the shame of it, the

awful fiction of it; you never wrote about it,

not directly, not truthfully. it’s okay. sometimes

it’s okay not to write, to get through october

with closed eyes & a tight grip on the steering wheel.

it’s okay to write instead about the seasons or

the school newspaper or oak trees or

anything that doesn’t keep you up at night.

it’s okay to write a beautiful lie until it becomes

your truth. who knows- it could even become a beautiful truth.

Just write. Write anything.

The graphite in your pencil doesn’t care

Where you’re taking it. Take it somewhere. And when you get there,

Flip to the first page of your old journal and start reading. See how far

You’ve come, and how far the road stretches ahead. Open your eyes; look

In the mirror; look at yourself. Smile. Write about what you see, now. Write anything.