Musehunter

[ctrlcreep]

Stare at the blank page. Switch your text editor to night-mode. White abyss, black abyss; does it make a difference?

You think that, maybe, inaccessible to you, there exists a color that will draw words from your soul. Graphogenetic. Like green black boards are to the mathematicians who fill them, chalk dust cocaine crop circles forming a delirium of polygons, formulae, sequences of integers intimately coded into the universe.

You, however, are not a purveyor of numbers. Your letters have known meanings, are not abstract, not variable. One could say the letters don’t matter, except insofar as they form words. Nor do the words matter, really, unless strung together they sing.

Gnash your teeth, vacuum-headed author, document as empty as your skull. Meditation has never appealed to you, and in fact your attempts at it have proven futile, your brain-chatter decidedly irrepressible and un-peaceful. Yet in this moment you’ve achieved a Buddha-like stasis, the experience of non-being, or of pre-verbal, pre-sentience being.

You want to run a pickaxe through your brain, onto the page, pinning a squirming idea to the ink. You go night fishing in your own mind, casting a line into uncertain waters; you retrieve nothing but the moon and the waves. Not even a monster.

Switch off night-mode. The screen is bright as bridal veils, and you can see little whirlpools in it, the tadpole distortions of lace. You recall an interview between a critic and a successful filmmaker.
“Idea, concept, they are beautiful, yes? Like maiden at wedding. Flower. Very nice, perfect.”
“Come night, you are now husband, you will tear wedding dress off. Now you create family, child maybe, union.”
“Yes, this is what I mean to say: to create, you must rape the bride.”
It echoes in your skull. It sounds like truth.

Gather the tape, the rope, the rope, the knife. Your best leather gloves. You know what to do; go where the lovely people gather.

[Player1]

White Write

Everyone knows the pages are white but so are the words too.
Perhaps it’s time to get some black books
To fatten the margins, and look at the bones and tongues and limbs that have been mangled and contorted
Exiled from the “good” book. All in the name of story.
The fingerprints that trail, sticky, reckless across endless pieces of paper.
All of them white.
Most of them from the thick thumbs of men.
Who from Chaucer to the wide assortment of Charles ( Darwin, Dickens, Bukowski,)
Have laid their handprints all over the literary hall of fame.
Burnt off invisible fingerprints, worn down from the generational mark of incessant cruelty.
Calloused by overzealous guitar playing, doodling and burying bodies.
They, you, this tribe of descendents from the Caucasian cavemen who wielded a club, a bible, a gun, a pen.
Have burned witches, have burned slaves and gasp have burned books
Inside your head, all of them shout clamouring for attention.
They spill over from the bookshelves of libraries and twist themselves into fond, throaty knots,
inside the Adam’s Apples of revered professors and other so called brilliant men who are cheap with women’s bodies, and couldn’t write a decent woman character without undressing and redressing her with their own sloppy, salacious tongues.
There are different ways to read.
I promise. They are there.
They have been written, they are being written, they have been lived they are being lived.
Their are stories where women need not be dull and lifeless sacrifices or dull and lifeless brides.
Octavia Butler hit the best sellers list posthumously after years and years of predicting the future with an elegant truthful tongue.
And while Roy, Smith, Morrison ( and that’s Toni not Van), Angelou, Lorde, Smith, Woolf - et al
Have forced their way into the canon
There are still too many men who go about blowing things up for fun.
They might not carry muskets or wear the hats of the first Settlers - but they still carry pens.
They still scratch us out
Although we are indelible, made of blood and fat and bits of earth and clay.
We have long since learned not to trust the thin ink of your half hatched history to hold our voices, our bodies.
We are scrawling ourselves across the walls, in the sands
We have made our own pulpits, we are each others loudhailers
A million sirens who will sing each other to sleep and chant each other awake.
Our names are the bridges in mouths that are learning to go unquiet.
Our tongues, like the snakes of Medusa (who by the way was a rape victim too) are moving in and out of each others ears, and mouths, hearts, vaginas.
We are borrowing and amplifying each other’s words. With exclamation marks!!!
And sometimes hashtags## when we feel like it ( and this you will not consider literature but we move with the times and know that poetry is for the mass of the masses)
We have not been afraid of the black books, the black magic, the black ink, the black night, the black holes
And we will come for you.
We are here on the page.
And we will hold hostage your tired tropes of inspiration.
The muses you used for your amusement, will not kill you
But make you redundant
A death not even a white man, a white write can survive.
We will come for the white write
Especially those who think rape is a passable metaphor.
Especially those who demand the page to hold the blood of marriage, of death - not of childbirth or menstruation mind you, because you don’t know how to write about that.
Our bodies lazily tossed in as plot points, our bras, our fingernails, our severed heads -
Amalgamated into the fullest stop of all full stop.
And now, soon, one day.
The page will reject and spew out your blood-soaked colonial name, recoil from the disappointing plod and prod of your fingers.
Until there is no more white write.