Skip to main content

In My Head

 Sharing with The Sunday Muse #243.


The writer in my head is never honest.
He sits back, pokes a memory...sighs.
Reassures me it's completely meaningless.
He grabs a sheaf of ideas, fans them out:
Detritus. High school? Offices before social media?
One by one, he feeds them into the fire.
Briefly, he stares into the flames,
Shakes his head, tilts back, stares at the ceiling.
He's stuck in a ready room. 
In a skull.
He could make fifteen different novels
At least one deathless sword-and-sorcery series
Out of this--he'd be the wizard.
The fire crumples the paper, petals it.
A vase of charcoal, fiery blooms.
Boring. Burn the worst, the best.
He's a liar, a fabulist, a critic,
with a sorcerous talent for disparagement. 

Greetings and salutations!  Thanks for the kind wishes toward Merlin, who has been doing well this week, alternating between super bouncy (is there food potentially available? new people around?) and his natural pillow state (see below).


-- Chrissa


Comments

  1. ✿January 21, 2023 at 7:59 AM

    I especially love the opening:

    "The writer in my head is never honest.
    He sits back, pokes a memory...sighs."

    And this:

    "The fire crumples the paper, petals it."

    "a fabulist" ... that too :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. rallentandaJanuary 21, 2023 at 8:07 AM

    Hmmm.....there are a lot of interesting ideas going around in your head:) Quite complicated ones. Pats and tickles for Merlin.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Carrie Van HornJanuary 21, 2023 at 12:38 PM

    This speaks to and for every poet's mind and muse Chrissa! I love this so much and the feeling it swiftly tosses at us! Brilliant writing my friend! I am glad Merlin is feeling better. He is so adorable!

    ReplyDelete
  4. JimJanuary 21, 2023 at 4:27 PM

    A bummer for a Muse. But you write sooo many nice things, it has to be fiction, can't' you.
    ..

    ReplyDelete
  5. Gillena CoxJanuary 21, 2023 at 10:42 PM

    All the possibilities in the head of this creative writer.

    Merlin looks happy 😊

    Much❤love

    ReplyDelete
  6. Keith's RamblingsJanuary 22, 2023 at 8:13 AM

    This makes my layed back muse sound very lazy!

    ReplyDelete
  7. qbitJanuary 22, 2023 at 2:08 PM

    "He's a liar, a fabulist, a critic" - isn't that the truth!

    ReplyDelete
  8. Susie ClevengerJanuary 25, 2023 at 12:07 PM

    Oh this speaks to me of how much I argue with the writer in my head, often not trusting she's given me anything worth a pen or keyboard.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Treacle Season

  Sharing with The Sunday Muse #190 ,  hosted this week by Carrie. Keaton was great in that show—the one with wings— Where he was constantly a [man]child on a ledge  dreaming an angel who became a superhero.   She was a sarcastic (fake?) angel—it was the 80s— But always good, on time, her lessons easy, Easy as it would have been for him to fall.   The metaphor so obvious...but I didn't get it. Nor the easy and obvious good. (/s)   I watch the TV movie every other December Remembering believing in easy And crushing on this character, that city...   Angels should be sweet, sarcastic figures, knowing (like nurses and social workers) we prefer Sleeping on the ledge, reckless to call for "heroes." To clear up any confusion:  there is no Michael Keaton movie we watch every holiday season. Although, if there were...I'd probably watch it.  -- Chrissa
16 comments
Read more

Turn Away

  Sharing with The Sunday Muse , for #193. Turn away, like the moon, listening... Listening to the planet that rumbles with a hundred million slaps. All the feet, all the rockets, all the  pistons in the cars on the asphalt over the chasm where the veins run deep, blue in sunlight, black at night. Running over the chasm.  Once or twice they ran to you. Once or twice they ran by. Greetings and salutations. The sky is an entertaining shade of concrete yellow as the rain promised earlier in the week makes good on its arrival. It's a disturbing bright sallow sky, the kind of sky that puts you in mind of old movies and degraded film stock and the pops and crackles incidental to the main story.  Several years ago I made a resolution to journal more and last year I came across a video that suggested I actually re-read those journals, at least those of the previous year, at the beginning of each new year. Technically, I have kept the journal resolution, making daily notes in the margins of
15 comments
Read more

Revelations

 Sharing with The Sunday Muse #169 : It takes time for the quest to settle into your calves, to work through your soles and up to your shoulders, spreading through nerve and vessel until  you can't go home because you've already left something of yourself there. You can't be in two places at once. You remember vacations but now you think your family's plans probably resembled some supervillain's monologue:  we'll do this and then take them here. It'll be fun. When do you leave the house on time? Who's time? There's a collar of dead bushes at the lawn in front of the gas station, a tiny, grassy patch of the suburbs beyond, ruins of landscaping, bright, dead. Two years ago feels like twenty, feels loud, a power wash of wind through the window; roaring down the dry sewers that funnel a/c through the lawns and backwards, carrying dreams dry and sharp. At this speed, everything cuts as it passes. Appendix 1:  Chrissa is Full of Stuff and Nonsense Let'
13 comments
Read more