When you did not want to write, did you write?
When you did not want to feel, did you feel?
When you did not want to eat, did you cook anyway, some thick and warming stew from someone else’s land, a place where food is not fraught with concern, or pleading, because it is culture and it is not remotely convenient to lovingly make – did you cook?
When you could not write, when desire was no longer the question, did you go outside and cover your hands with black dirt, did you dig deep holes and haul buckets full of your own loud grunts and smash the clods of your uselessness into the ground, did you watch the clumps of clay become smaller particles, for growing food that the slugs would eat, except that you will come out at six o’clock in the morning when you should be writing, into the still cool garden with a paper cup of dishwater and reverently pick the slugs, kneeling in the dewey better-than-clay so that your knees look like a toddler’s?
When you will not write, will you pick slugs with abandon, feel their slippery bodies, marvel at their round pearlescense, at the horrors they have wrought on your greens, at how inert they are rendered by the iridescent bubbles in your rapidly dissolving paper cup?
When you didn’t write but instead went outside to stare numbly at the sky and then a hawk came kiting by, lazily, all freedom all pleasure, did you remind yourself that you are one with the painter who can’t paint, the choreographer who can’t dance, the sculptor who hits the rock and no water, no mercy, gushes out?
And you are also the slug, and the clay, and the twice eaten leaf.
When you could not sing, did you sing anyway?
You are also the hawk.
And you are the chicken poop stuck to your bare feet and you are the buried phosphorescence of the fungi telling stories to the trees, making all things grow.
When you could not write, did you at least grow?
And even if it died, whatever you grew, did you remember that there is life in the withered plant, the shoveled poop, the splintered branches hurled into the yard by the storm?