Ava Wahl

They say, write what you know.

But the truth is, a writer knows all

Knows no confinement,

No definement

For she colors the words her own.

In a rainbow of complexity,

With brevity

She tells of the brutal truth of the human condition:

Our disposition,

acquisition, and the

competition of man

Against his home, his horrors, and

Oftentimes, his own kind.

A writer’s eye bears witness to these speakable crimes,

And each word she dares write carries the weight of the world,

tangible,

palpable,

powerful,

A testament to those that have gone

A warning to those yet to come

Or, perhaps, a promise.

You decide.

How are we meant to take this charge and leverage

This lettered load?

These buckled shoulders can only take so much before they,

too,

Splinter like a piece of broken lead.

Who else knows the plight of the writer, that sinister loneliness,

everlasting?

From our sewn stories bleed

The tears of humankind, its fantasies and

Follies spilled, stripped naked

For all to see.

It is possible that every writer knows the same pain

The pain that comes with everything we’ve

ever wanted,

dreamed of,

hoped for

This creed, this need to capture humanity in a marble

And study its swirled surface with nought but a quill and ink

To shed light on such entanglement.

In the heart of every artist, entrapped in their struggling

Soul, is the notion that not all which is seen

Can be described,

That in every microcosm

Of a life there is something, someone,

That must die.

To be a writer, then, is to hold every memory

Ever made on display,

In disarray we discover that not every face can be drawn by

These ample hands,

No matter how hard we may try.