Sometimes Making Stuff is Hard. Oh, well.

If you wait on the arms, if you hold them still at your side, if you walk down the hall in a straight line with them clasped behind you like a tanglefingered bunny tail.  If.  That's the question. 

How loudly are you allowed to play your music on the second floor of your office building?

Answer:  Always.

From the first floor of the farmhouse, she sits above a pile of basement cast-offs:  the interior of a fish tank with its lights and breathing tubes goldfishless, all the crocheted afghans that can't be cast off after so many hours at the fingers that conceived you and the tangled yarn you slept below.

The antenna lights blink red from seven miles east.  The little girl is sleeping and the mice have all been caught.  Not a creature is stirring for miles but for the pigs out back and the farm cats now curled beneath the burnt rose bush.  I expected them to swell earlier with kitten.  Now with Fall in the night, I noticed today the low swing in the calico belly.  I'll tie a box filled with old blankets to the back porch rail for the winter.  The wind has a tendency to blow these houses around.

I huddle over the keyboard expecting a fire, expecting the fingers to conceive just a small piece of light.

And if they ask for whom you write, tell them you write for writing.  Though this won't be true at all.