It’d Be A Crime

It would be a crime – albeit a misdemeanor – to be a half-block from the ocean with a new journal in hand, and not write by the sea.

The symmetrical punctuation of sea & sky over the ellipsis of brown dune grass is all needed for inspiration.

The bench can face either direction: the haze lids my thoughts.

Without the energy of walkers, the boardwalk is a meditation, the heat of its wood calming as a forest at midday.

I am studying prayer now. This requires a fresh frame of mind founded not in everyday thinking. Prayer is a lifelong study, a bursting, Oh My God! of inspiration. I have not learned enough & may never do so about connecting to Divinity, not in my mortal years.

I wade in the shallows of morning finding shells of life. Funny no one else has chosen this beautiful spiral one here, striped in pearl. It has always been mine to claim, pocket, protect & cherish.

In administering my days, my life has changed, dividing its own house over & over. I sit beside my perception of the nature of God, writing, & no one asks what I say. The artist nearby is constantly interrupted as people peer over her shoulder, catch her hovering glance.

Writers remain anonymous, uninterrupted, silent. I recognize myself as a shadowy thoughtform as church bells ring in the distance. The earth is incandescent with changing light; the sea shows green, blue, gray with the lengthening day. My pen nib worries the paper, a slippery future escapes before being set between the lines. That artist only paints, after all, the simplest rendering of 3D life. The writer lifts all the dimensions, putting bookmarks among them, finding lost punctuation, pearling words, simmering descriptions. She knits these together precociously, ferociously, furious & bleeding, she writes. Surfaces do not hold, seams burst apart, giants wake & roar, words soar, sour, separate all the layers & put them back together as they never were before.

She stares down a pixelating universe unraveling itself as quickly as it can. She writes it all; nothing is ever lost again.