You can be as good of a writer from day one as you will be when you die. What is next on the line is often defined by time, and like an expensive wine, it adds taste and pleasure with age. The more I look back at my early work, the less reserved I am, and willing to say what is really in my heart and mind. A sure sign of a poet. Now, it seems like an ugly competition that I feel no joy fighting with. A posture posing with all of my clothes on. No fun. At least when we fight there is a rush to believing what we are fighting for is right, even when it’s over something stupid. It is very common in my life, wasting a lot of energy on stupidity. It wasn’t until I went back to the busy life of my childhood bedroom that I saw just how cluttered even my sharpest attention span really leaves me with. Fragments of a bewildered, scared and stupid idiosyncrasy. It’s like getting better at typing on a typewriter or taking film pictures, it’s outdated but has become more valid in its own meaning. Art for Art. Love for Love. And yes, Life for Death.
When I’m really depressed I laugh at Hunter S. Thompson’s suicide letter.
The Football game is over.
No more games.
No more fun.
It reminds me that I am young and have so much time before I decide to kick the bucket. I laugh to myself sardonically with a twinge of sanguine. I grapple with the contention that if a person is marked by suicide does it make their words that much more significant? I don’t understand why we are so attracted to the ones who kill themselves. Maybe it is the amount of control they have over their lives, in all, even death. I imagine them all to be out of control is the real sad paradoxic. Maybe I’ll be so happy one day I’ll just kill myself. And I’ll want is people to be happy for me that I thought highly enough about myself that all my literature would be recognized by a lurid distinction. I don’t want to tell people that a trigger warning is necessary. I want them to feel those emotions they bottle up inside. I think the things that scare us should be celebrated instead of overlooked. I’m cooked. I promise you, someday, people will hate me for my words.
I thought about a poem I heard over five years ago today when it finally applied to me.
What happens when there is nothing left to catch the flame.
To me, it’s relationship advice. I never liked the poet who wrote it as a person but we don’t have to admire an artist to admit that they are capable of making us feel even the most intimate of emotions. We often don’t want to admit to ourselves the depth of their cut when it’s someone we dislike. Sometimes being pretentious is deserved. I think we are all just getting worse. It is time to get over it, but for each regret, I have a new incantation that allows me to forget.
Ben Bonkoske 