To Writers: On Writing.
August 7th, 6:26 a.m. : The perfect example of what today's populace would fawn and fantasize over, as "the quintessential moment" ---
the amateur film directors, fumbling with their lenses, focus hard their trained photographic memories in anticipation of it.
A ripe North Carolinian sunrise, the light dusting a quiet summer's Sunday morning space with the softest kind of contrast, fuzzy, like a China-Doll's cheeks, permanently pinched. In fact, I think that's what really does it... it's the impermanence of it all. Sure, the Sun will strew about the moment along its course, Japanese men wake up in "Tomorrow Land" while we stuff our ears with cotton and kiss our televisions goodnight, so very American. There will be another tomorrow, it could be identical to today… but the writers won't want to take their chances. Their cult knowledge of Parisian Film-Noir and found Polaroid exposures, forbid it! It's the perfect setting to write something prolific! "There has to be, there must be something" they could extract, that contained all the right elements and evolutionary features to stand the test of time. Something so profound and simple, they would surely be remembered when they're dead, isn't that what being a "Poet" is all about?
I would not agree with their, however romantic, misplaced nostalgia. I feel there is a distinct separation between the individuals who, indeed, write in a more technical sense of the term, which doesn't always speak for the quality of the writing, more the driving force of it ---and, the others who reach or sink or melt into another, entirely different realm, a world where writing is not, necessarily, a choice. Writing is, to them, not a means to play with or prove themselves, it's an affliction that can only be understood by those who are mutually afflicted.
Indeed I have found others, a select and diverse collective with this shared, secret desire to laugh, unprovoked, amidst a fit of despair. To watch, bright-eyed, that chuckle, that mass of expanded air to rise up and out and away from them all together! Only to hesitate within their gaze, a bubble, long enough to be reminded of a long-since-forgotten childhood memory…and then, a moment of incarnation, possession! The words it causes flow in slowness with no sound of scratch-out-ink , no click of a metal pencil being flipped on its axis to erase a phrase, seemingly pointless or mistaken.
There is no room, no possibility for the manic second-guessing and word-selection, this is a "true" moment. It is not so much an act of creation, but more so, a bout of clarity you surprise yourself into, like curing your hiccups by catching, on accident, your image in a mirror. It's a clear and calm remembering, those moments, the Poets, unlearned and without scrutiny, only find themselves tired and in need of numbness in its wake – concluding that it was the "nothingness" they had always been burning, full of their wordy clutter, for. The moment is naturally an accident, it never happens when one would expect it. Simultaneously, the others foolishly flail their butterfly-nets at dawn, at dusk, on ghetto stoops and edgy garbage dumps, to slow those wasted "perfect" moments --- in hopes to glean and study with the airy curiosity of a brilliant, but young, engineer.
It almost never happens on these glorious Southern mornings, or amongst a more modern body of filth and poverty humming on a city bus. When it strikes, and when it does so in such separately distinct multitudes and various intensities, it almost seems alive – like someone is testing you, presenting a challenge. Yet, this entity has an eerie familiarity, there is at once and always a suspicion that it is not someone else, but only our selves. This conundrum haunts until one comes to the realization that, regardless of its source, its power and purpose is irrefutable.  Once it has proved to you, or you have proven it, to existence, its significance… you will know the level of your devotion as you have come to know the lesser, more tormenting parts of yourself.
Symptoms of the affliction manifests in a more "obvious" ways, a sort of "nesting" affect takes place, a "hoarding" of sorts, with various amounts of particularity and taste, style or lack-there-of. There is a gradual accumulation of things… notebooks, pencils, pens, different styles for different moods, bigger bags to carry them in. You learn to always be prepared for when it may strike again. Perhaps, this time, it will be at the gas station, on the highway or in a traffic jam, or during your final biology exam at the University. Still, you could not have planned on being so affected by the obviousness of the frogs and formaldehyde and the Sorority girl to your right who applied some gaudy shade of brown to her eyes, so unaware, so blind in her preservatives to realize the fury and the poetry she instilled in you. You'll spend the allotted time, instead, writing… You'll get a "C" and be pleased, but, hey, a "D" would just mean a worthy sacrifice, in your grade-book anyway. And when your parents' concerned eyes crescent downward with a look of confused, but not wholly-unexpected, worry---
you'll evoke an explanation and get half a mumble muttered until you skirt around the "reality" and please them with an easy answer they are less likely to dub "absurd".

"Never been much of a Scientist."
Never been one to measure in time as it is prone to tick away and take with it, those potential "Silver-Screen, Prime-Poetry-Writing" moments. It's much more fun to let them hunt, to let them catch you, but most of all, to be captured by them. To swim in your captivation and exist within the captivity of where you choose to build the walls.
To the writers, on writing; Between you and I, I've never regretted the things I've prolonged or cast aside in the, almost, autonomy of the Writer's affliction.  There is no shame in me for this blatant difference in responsibility, because that's all it is really. Something different, not special or unique, no, we leave those things for the "moment chasers", the "scientists" of the craft are much happier with them. No shame, no "what-if's", I only know a subtle strength of intuition that insists I am not alone in it.