Late October and a story waits.
Voices that fog the window,
cloud the rain outside.
From other tables,
"She wonders / he needs / they will..."
fragments of conversations spill.
One canceling the other
over the soothing steamy
hum of the coffee machine,
a Saturday's relief.
Suddenly,
a still point and the writer begins
rolling voices tightly into her pen,
scribbling across white pages.
These undependable characters will join
the Once Upon a Time... coming later.
"As a kid I loved the places where one could get lost while engaging in the act of creativity, the places inside one's head. … I discovered that making things meant leaving evidence of life behind when I moved on. Making things was like leaving historical records of my existence behind when I left the room, or building, or neighbourhood, the state, and possibly the earth. As in mortality. As in death."
David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives, 1991
