Yes, We Can!

Martin Luther King Jr:
I have a dream.
Barack Hussein Obama:
I am the Dream!

My Writing Tools

My writing tool is mental – my merry-go-round mind. It must be playful and skittish, with wery wittle worry, for me to succeed at wasabi writing … if I ever write well. When I cannot check the influx and interplay of real life, then I cannot use my mental writing tool.

My writing device is emotional. A split bag of complex tangles to share. I find that extreme experience gives me adjectival fodder. The calm, soft centre is a writer’s block for me. I must love or loathe something to write wonderful things about it.

My writing world is spatial. I can write anything anytime anywhere. But my selective writing milieu is home, with nobody else within a millivolt mile, and the TV droning on somewhere. The best writing time for me is late at night, after 2 or more stress-free hours and no need to rise up at early-elf morning.

My writing instrument is physical. It is a pen, a pencil and a notebook. The same pen, pencil and notebook for a while, in order for my creative juices to condescend to flow on-the-quick-ask. It is not a keratin keyboard – no, that’s work, not art.

Hag Agape!

Wizened, still-young-ish woman! Something tells that her personal life has been far from austere. But she ranks monstrous beneath the grace of the about-to-be-named musical instrument. She’s sitting at a high-noon banking hall with her legs yawning wide, under her long skirt, like a concertina.

Burnt

Once you get burnt
A part of you is charred
And everywhere you go
You leave a trace of ashes.

A Chinese Dispenser

A little Chinese man in office clothes is idling at the car port in front of the foyer of a 4-star Accra hotel. He clears his throat in strident bursts, and leaps to one of the silver trash cans placed near the pillars (still at the entrance). He sprays his spittle into the bin with no awareness of self. As I struggle to lift my anguished jaw off the immaculate floor, he asks the doorman for the restaurant. It’s just as well that he (not I) is going to eat.

Holiday

Untidy desk
Almost Grotesque
I'm on a mental holiday
On this crazy, working day

Why We Write

A big, black bird with one bandaged, broken wing, spiralling backwards, wildly and upside-down, as if its steely claws are tethered by invisible solar threads.

Try rivalling that image with song or sculpture, photograph or paintbrush! It will be static; if not that, unfaithful to reality; if not that, frivolous; if not that, staged, disingenuous!

Take our fractured flyer again. A big black bird – it could be a ravenous raven, blistering buzzard, colossal condor, or an elegant eagle or some other brilliantly-plumed predator (altering the geographical setting every time). This is A-to-Z imagination at your choosing!

We write because we hate a blank, blue sky or a vivid, but frozen, gelid portrait.