Wednesday, January 14, 2015 – Oh how lovely to begin this day with a beautiful sunrise – all pink and lavender and blue – and move on to a Billy Collins poem called “Writing in the Afterlife” which is a kind of writing hell where one is shackled into a boat and told to describe the place in all its detail:
. . . not just the water, he insists.
rather the oily, fathomless, rat-happy water.
not simply the shackles, but the rusty,
iron, ankle-shredding shackles –
and that our next assignment would be
to jot down, off the tops of our heads,
our thoughts and feelings about being dead.
Not really an assignment.
the man rotating the oar keeps telling us –
think of it more as an exercise, he groans,
think of writing as a process.
a never-ending, infernal process. . . .
Haha! And I’m off to my next writing assignment.
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