Blade Against Words
Writers are so stange and fiercely protective over their work!
After we have first spit "it" out, letting it move through the birth canal of our minds - after holding the words there from conception to the fetus form - we then lay the flesh upon the bones, shaping, molding, re-shaping, strengthening certain areas of muscles and tissure, adding a feature, creating the "face" of "it" - along with the expression, mind and emotions. Trying to whittle away at our creation - to edit - no matter how logical our reason - and for what purpose - we draw back, twisted with panic - avoiding the knife ... as though the blade was to be laid against our flesh - either to slice deeply, or just scrap away thin slivers.
It hurts! I almost can't stand it - and become strangely unreasonable - pushing at the ridiculous hostility which surges up in me at the thought of forcing myself to 'hone' at my living words.
These eccentrics - these sometimes perverse and uncontrolled wires which coil with vengeance - unexpected within my gut - then snap, hot and loose - pressing against my insides when unsuspecting 'foreign-lips' venture their opinion, laced with their opinionated blade. I find myself struggling for blank-faced control - and left with my own solitary sense of being alien - someway, detached from the main-stream of the humanity which I have allowed to fill my world.
Dallas Beth Williams Gibson
Journal Entry - December 24, l990