I could be Alice in my version of Wonderland

I actually wrote this last year as an assignment. Reading trhough it, I think it works pretty well with Why I Write:

Cecil was a caterpillar. Cecil was my friend. The last time I saw Cecil, he was this big. I said “Cecil, what have you done?”

What Cecil the caterpillar had done was create a book worm –a print consuming monstrosity that would be swayed by neither television nor the occasional recreational activity. I had never really been one for the outdoors. Growing up in a city where the park was about as safe as a loaded gun in a slum village, I had to learn how to keep myself safe from my thoughts and the reality of the stagnancy that was fast becoming my childhood.

I had been Alice long before Wonderland became a metaphor for half-lived dreams and half-conscious concepts. My rabbit was clad in four-inch heels and a working suit. We navigated our way through the concrete jungle and found the rabbit hole at the end of an alley on West Street. Howl’s Moving Castle had settled in Durban’s CBD and I had stumbled into Narnia. The smell of unopened pages in aged books did to me what I had seen fairy dust do to Peter Pan.

From the day of what I continue to believe was my greatest discovery, I did believe in fairies. What was in that book store-cum-paradise was a fantasy so otherworldly that not even J.K Rowling and all the wizards of Hogwarts could conjure up. I drove my first car in the rooms of that establishment. With my hands on Christine’s devilish dashboard I raced into a Paradise Lost and found myself in the world of prose and poetry. I have never looked back.

Since that first glance into the looking glass I have gathered my rosebuds while I may and welcomed literature with an Embrace that Mark Behr has returned effortlessly for the past seven years. A lot has happened in that time. I have fallen in love, for one. In the Eleven Minutes that it took me to find Paulo Coelho, I had re-invented myself into an entity that had her life written on unread pages as much as she had her heart captured in The Picture of Dorian Grey.

Cecil was a caterpillar. Cecil was my friend. The first time I saw Cecil, he was this big. I said “Cecil, why are you this big?” He said, “I was just born”. I was born with Cecil that day, and will die when Veronika finally decides to die successfully.

Why I Write

There is a poem I have been writing for about four years now. No, that’s a lie. It would be more accurate to say that it has been writing itself. It comes to me in sporadic phrases, sometimes entire verses, at odd times. I’ve written these phrases on the strangest items: seat covers, toilet paper, pillow-cases and cash receipts. This is why I cannot, for the life of me, go anywhere without a pen. The poem is relentless, the poem is unforgiving, and the poem begins like this:  

Paste the physical to language and sketch my body in consonants.

Read between my eyes to see what is constant within the contacts.

I need you to find context in my content and write me in a way

that will make the fears in me content.

I deal with it because it opened my eyes to the fact that I might be a writer. I deal with it because it has tamed some of my fears. The fear of emoting, the fear of being forgotten, the fear of speaking. No single person who knows me can deny that I prefer the sound of pen on paper to any piece of music (and, quite honestly, any voice). I think that the answer to the question of why I write lies somewhere in that last sentence. Simply put, I write because I hate the sound of my own voice and the way that it constantly trips over words. Not as poetic as you would have imagined it to be, yes?

Make me eternal.

Seal my laughter in your paragraphs and paint my different smiles

into your essay of life.

Make sure to script the words in long lines of cursive because those sentences...they will make me eternal.

The poem is honest and the poem is mine. I want you to understand that I am making no claim to the words. I know nothing of their origins and care even less about them. All I need to know about these words is that I can make them my own. Imagine being able to transform a single pair of shoes into about 80 different items, each with its own unique use. Words give you the power to do just that –create and recreate. The poem, like the very words that construct it, is an entity.

Write me in fact and reject fiction.

Construct into your diction my description and in every syllable I must be able to find

a clear distinction between who I really am and who you want me to be.

Write me in your own vocabulary to make me contemporary.

I write because just as a writer writes a story, the story writes the writer. You can never be too sure what you’re going to get when you put ink on paper. It is the honesty that the act of writing invokes in us that makes it such a fundamental form of art to me. The poem is not finished and the poem is not exquisite, but the words are true and the words are honest.

            Find just the right punctuations to reflect the pauses in my speech.

Write me in words that make the alphabets rise above the pictures they create

because the words...they are just that beautiful.