I found myself in a hole today, consumed by the desire to just fade away, and so I took off my skin and rolled up my arms, peeled off my legs, those ever sexy charms, put my voice in my pocket, my eyes on a hook, threw my ears in the air, where they were nabbed by a crook; next came my lungs, followed soon by my heart, and once those were gone, I got down to my art.

With my imagination scribbling in the mud and the dirt, I found words that would tickle me, I found words that would hurt. I imagined a man named Cole and another named Matt, but they were just names: if characters, then flat. So I backed off a bit, returned to the beginning, but lo and behold, my plot started thinning. With nothing for it but to call to the gods (a tough job for an atheist, an atheist flawed), I sang to the heavens, “Do you have something for me?” They laughed and they pointed and asked, “What would that be?”

“Nothing to grand,” I said with a sigh, “Just something to win me that great Nobel prize. You must understand, it’s not the money I’m after…”

“Not that you’d refuse it,” they said with more laughter.

“I just want to write something with meaning, something that means something, with meaning be teeming.”

“But what could that mean, this meaning you seek? The words must come first, you sciolistic freak. Your mentor in writing, the great Derrida, that linguistic terrorist with je ne sais quoi, he said himself, with words that we like, a simple definition of what it means to write. It’s to be incapable, and this is what he wrote, to make meaning precede writing, like a body and ghost — there can be no spirit, unless the body comes first (despite what they tell, ’cause there’s no heaven but earth). We’re not talking religion, just energy and matter, the egg and the chicken, the pancake and batter.

“You want to write something,” the gods continued to say, “That will mean something to people who are living today? You gotta stop looking for meaning, and start thinking of terms, because when it’s creation you’re after, the words are your sperm.”

“That may not be true,” I said with a grin (’cause everyone knows I am argumentative), “If it’s the words that come first, then what about the Jabberwock? Didn’t Carroll teach us, it’s the spirit that talks?”

But the gods replied, as they’re wont to do (I mean, who disagrees with a god except me and you?), “But then again, there’s Frost, with his ’sound of sense.’ As the meaning of a line, it sets the poet against those others who say that originality comes first, yet Frost showed them faithfully it’s the sound of the dirt in the voice of the people who breathe and shit, who live their lives through pain, through toil, through grit. So now you know how to go about creating a soul for your character named Matt and your character named Cole: put words in their mouth, hear how they’re formed; sound out what they say to let their spirits be born!”

It was good advice, even I had to admit: give my characters a voice; and if I can’t, then I’ll quit.

So I rolled down my arms, found my skin in the mud, put back my heart to start pumping my blood. I found my eyes with my hands, they were both there on the hook, took my voice out of my pocket, and started to look, ’cause somewhere beyond the hole where I sat, some crook had my ears; ’till then, where’s my hat?