means. meanings.

His hands were quivering. Saltine droplets forming across the bridge of his forehead, trailing down his pudgy nose, as he contemplates the pristine page before him. A blank canvass waiting to be breathed into life, by his letters forming words, strung into sentences, weaved into paragraphs, and composed into a thought, a feeling, a longing.

He puts down the cigarette on the ashtray, and brushes the vellum with his fingertips. The pen felt right in his hand. It was a classic Papermate Kilometrico ball-point. Its slender one-piece synthetic casing slid snuggly between his fat elfin fingers. The favorite cheap pen that glides over parchment and newsprint effortlessly, as it does on linen and stock. The comfort of holding the pen stirs his cognizant self, and he could feel the words brewing inside of him, images and dialogues, scenes and plots, beginning to flow. Gushing from the depths of his consciousness, through his hands, by the pen, and into the page, it started. This macabre dance of paper and pen segueing from line to line, across a landscape rendered in rules of graduations, measured and ordered.

It is no easy feat, and he knows this by heart. To divulge and distill those thoughts that inhabits his consciousness into the syntax legible and comprehensible for others. It meant, necessitated, that he must break himself apart into myriad morsels so he could pilfer the content from the orgy of ideas, into a valid construct. A singular conception resting upon the shoulders of a turbulent mountain of datum – of emotions, information, facts, ruminations, perspectives, opinions, deductions, and memories.

But it is detrimental, to write that is. It is the bloodletting that he thirsts, the rather complex purging that affords his peace. Only by the extraction of the essential unto the awaiting page can he rid himself of the demons that threaten his sanity, and only by the action of digestive cognition can he experience the verbalization of his internal happiness. To speak of this happiness entails a wrist cut with the vulnerability of disclosure. That, to be happy is to be weak. To succumb and surrender to this happiness, with the fate and trust of a lover, is to reveal himself pure and unabridged, no sugarcoating or extraneous emphasis, unembellished, in situ.

This is his world, and he offers it whole to the willing.

The pen lingers beneath his lips, pursed and sprightly like a bird of prey posed for the hunt. He takes down the pen from his lips. It hovers over the page, and then touches the first line in the upper left corner. With his other hand, he puts out the cigarette, sips a drop of his bitter caffeinated beverage, sighs, and begins to write.



Original image from here.