Twenty.

Which came first -
the chicken or the egg?

Better question!
Which came first -
the writer or the idea?

Should be easy answer,
but it isn't
is it?

Do I birth ideas
(therefore, writer first)
or do ideas birth me
(therefore, idea first)?
Would I have been the writer
had the idea not struck me,
or is it that I was born the writer
and later discovered the idea?

Perhaps I am some anomaly
in which neither came first
then second
but simultaneously
as if by divine creation?

Perhaps that was a bit presumptuous.

Fourteen.

Shutting everything off,
shutting everything down.

There is peace in these bones
and it courses through my fingers
as words tumble,
cartwheel, pirouette
across blank pages.

No sound can
unravel me,
no smile can
distract me,
no flash can
unnerve me,
no pain can
disturb me.

There is peace in these bones
that wait to be useful,
wait to have purpose, meaning,
wait for thoughts to flow
and flood and drown, drown, drown.

Shutting everything off,
shutting everything down.

Three.

Does the rain beg the sun's forgiveness
for diminishing its light?
Do the clouds?
Do the trees with their stretching limbs
or mountains with their swelling peaks?

Or does the sun win every war
eventually,
no matter who survives each
battle,
and so every force
makes every attempt
it can possibly muster
to take a bite
out of that blazing yellow ball?

But why would they all
go to such lengths
just to fail
at every bend?

Perhaps because
a single wound
is worth more
that quiet compliance,
a single morsel
is worth more
than an empty stomach.

It all began in the second grade.

This affair with words, my self-indulgent means of expression.

When I was seven years old, I was suddenly possessed. A crippling doubt demon, with sharp horns and a crooked grin and blood-red skin, had manifested in my chest, making the Colorado air difficult to breathe. I realized I had a very important decision to make - what did I want to spend the rest of my life (or at least the next ten years) doing? I felt so behind, since two of my classmates had already discovered that their collaborative life purpose was to run away to California (over the Rocky Mountains in the thick of winter) to marry Leonardo DiCaprio in the wake of his performance in Titanic.

And so I pondered, weak, weary, juice-box-deprived, until it struck me like a finger of lightning, divine intervention. After I came out my electric coma, with crazed hair and slightly more crazed eyes, I proclaimed, "Writing! Writing, I say!" And with those words, the doubt demon abandoned my bones, slithering away until he found another unsuspecting second grader to wrap his slick tongue around. The sense of relief I felt was indescribably heart-opening. I immediately reached for a pen, and began to hear the stories I still, to this day, happily cannot silence.

However, my second grade teacher was concerned by this declaration, because the only stories I had written (to her knowledge) were those in a series of action-adventure picture books starring me and my favorite baby doll. Why she was so disturbed by these stories, I did not know, but it didn't matter (much) - I vowed then and there to prove to anyone who asked, challenged, or questioned, that authorship was my fate. It was not a choice I made (because I did not make the lightning strike), but one made for me that cannot now be unmade. I cannot escape this writer-me.

But why would I want to?