The novelist imagines…

Youth

Beauty

Brilliance

Brains

And pushes for their contradictions.

What it’s like outside ones own skin.

What goes on inside that woman’s head.

I’ll admit, oftentimes I look around and think, very quietly and to myself alone, that other people seem oh so unconscious.

Occupied so immediately with the PRESENT PROBLEM…which is always immediate, albeit limited to hunger and rage. It’s this every shifting entitlement of our age that has, I sometimes think, caked over and buried any capacity for collective, connective thought.

Such has been unlearned over the years and people now waddle about in a state of frantic want.

And isn’t that sad?

For all of us. Even for me, poor writer, who sits back with her pen and thinks herself superior. Acknowledges the thought and feels sorry for it. Pushes on, examines it deeper and admits that it’s all fluff. All rubbish anyways.

Because her job is to imagine life inside another person’s shoes. And deep down, she fears herself too anxious to lace up and live in discomfort, anxiety and fear.

To stay there without the protective walls she’s built up, for longer than the length of a poem.

These split fragments of feeling. These seconds of insertion into distant hearts. Into the ambiguity of the Other. The road to creativity that moves in circles and ends at its beginning.

Ends with the realization that all hearts are familiar.