simpler, fewer, better

...words.

sometimes i say too much because i know the weight of words unsaid.
(that’s when too much is the right amount).

other times i say too much to take the weight from words i’ve just said.
(that’s what i’m catching myself doing lately),
saying more in order to say less. padding truth with fluff. hiding a poem inside another one…

and i’m trying to do that less.

so while i revisit my last missives with a scalpel, here’s a prose poem (i wrote after a dream about arguing ardently with a certain young writer in Paris) about saying exactly enough.

//

a mutable feast

maybe i should write    hungry    like he was, senses sharpened or whatever.  there is a clarity, i know, i have seen it.   the lightness.   then piercing lucidity, a technicolor world — imagine him in the musée    ravished    consumed by color and light, the pangs in his gut exclamation points on sensory sonnets — but it fades in dull, dizzy haze.   he didn’t tell us that part, not very romantic,    but neither is starving, really.  would you sing about your hunger now, watching a people shrink to nothing before our eyes?   that’s from truth, the other thing he always wanted to write.   so if i can tell you     one true thing    on this sea-salted rose-golded sonnet of a morning,    i ate    enough to quiet the pangs,  enough to find a middle ground between the old man and me,  to make    a softer truth    before the harsh heat of the day and the uglier facts of life.  he can write     one true thing    I will show you the rest.   the thing is, Hem, there’s always more to say.    brevity     is holding on   for another hour    a time    that is more    juste    but what if

                                                                                                                 //

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more soon, friends. be good to each other, will you? i’m sending love from here.

💚//mischa