The Spirit of the Writer (standard:romance, 609 words)
Author: Cyrano	Added: May 29 2006	Views/Reads: 3555/0	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
To write one must have talent. Talent is not exceptional grammar skills, but a nimbleness with words, a sense of the audience you want to attract, and an imagination you can pin to the page.

The Spirit of the Writer 

© Kelly_Shaw2001 

The spirit of this writer was born on a fast flying cloud, released by a
flash of lightning,  turning up naked, carried by a wave, on a distant 
shore. 

I lose myself in the depths of graves, mingling with bones, sifting
through dust looking for the heart of a hero or the soul of a herdsman, 
seeing each through the eyes of a beggar. I see the multitudes 
worshipping the hero, live for a moment within the serenity of a 
herdsman, and feel the clinging hope of the beggar as he receives bread 
from a stranger. I could stay and watch each story develop but my mind 
lives in transient abode, running the same course that writer's before 
me have run. Feeling the same sun, drinking from the same streams, 
seeing the same sights, meeting the changes they must have met while on 
their pilgrimage road. 

This journey sees me passing Saturn, on my way to Mars, dreaming
enchanted visions, plunged in twilight mysteries,  future callings that 
curdle with religion, with family, in native lands, and in the cradle 
carried on a child's tear, crossing boundaries no spacecraft could 
endure  to places where sunshine and rain are but words in a distant 
library. Pleasure and pain a velvety memory. Lunar electricity 
distancing me from the behemoths and their rutting beauty, carried by 
imagination toward a life force of the future, exiled in bottomless 
journeying nights and shrouded in the violet fog of words. 

I'm young love grown older, but not distant.  The spoils of a long walk,
capturing  misty rain, offering rosy fingers of fire to warm your face, 
sometimes distant, often absent, still completing my education.  I am a 
fabulous opera, a whirlwind, a Cimmerian shore, the deadly sweetness of 
infidelity. You'll find me in the darkest night, in central parks, 
every shopping mall, pool room, deli, ordering carrot salad or chicken 
from the spit. I'm every river that went to every ocean, every moment, 
long or short. I am the outside and the inside, the distant and the 
near, the magician and the rabbit. A mansion, a stoney end house where 
dancing stands still. I'm the lateness of the hour, the wind that 
drives leaves through iron railings during three dozen nights of 
winter. I'm quickening footsteps, a hotel room, snow falling in 
Amsterdam, Spanish steps, whispers in doorways, the ground on which you 
lay, the son of a fisherman, the face of many, the heart of all, and 
the space on which words must fall. 

I'm carried on the backs of a sea horses, sojourning among the
archipelago of dreams, drifting with mermaids under waves of pearl, 
below clamouring birds, tossed and turned and then made love to among a 
thousand shorelines.  I live in the wrecks of ships, my lungs sodden 
with water, mindless of hurricanes, grazing peacefully among the 
tranquility of prehistoric lives, transported on the adventures of 
childhood, soaring on the heights of the day, riding the genius of 
trouble. The child who sets every sail, and for whom there is never a 
turning back, to do or die. I am the knight riding the shore, exploits 
more violent than polar chaos, crusading through worlds of torment,  
misunderstandings, answering the spirit of the poor, the hermit, the 
holy man, the demon, the lothario,  bathing in the juices of women like 
a butterfly in May, touching the tender membranes, splitting the keel, 
and sailing ever on toward the untouchable looking for the mysterious 
beginnings of my soul. I live in scented caverns where children squat, 
needing everything but neglect, a child in the lower belly of 
literature. 


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