Creative distinction. A gift. A talent. A faux pas. There are a lot of thing that were taken away from me during our relationship, but the ability to create things was the most sinister. Rape I can deal with: It's not so hard to blank yourself out after you've been guilted into opening up your guts for cock, again, the fifth time this week and you can't really feel his pinprick dick in you, anymore (probably the reason he wants power so bad; dudes and their penises, I swear, how he'd measure it once a month like he expected it to grow, then say, 'Six inches isn't so bad, right? That's bigger than average,' as if anybody really cares about the size of a dick). It wasn't the rape that really got to me or bothered me, it was how in the beginning stages, I tried to share the things I had made with him. He would offer a lot of advice about the things I made. Mostly, the advice was that I was bad at making. Imagine a world where somebody can be bad at making, bad at expressing themselves through the creative process. Imagine a world where only one standard and only one opinion really matters. Imagine a world where all the labels on drinks and the billboards and the paintings on the walls and the poems and the parables and the novels and the quilts and the hairdos and the automobiles all look exactly alike, are all made in exactly the same form. Imagine a world that's cookie-cutter and hardlined where there are no blurred edges and there is no shading. Imagine a world that's only shells and outlines, that's anesthetized, that's had all the fervor and the joy and the personality taken out of it. Imagine that's the type of thing you must write for the approval of a man who can't read and then imagine that you can't write like that because you'll never write like that because the point of writing has never been pretty prose, just honest prose. Imagine a world where you must lie and sit pretty like a perfect little Stepford Wife and write only perfect little things like perfect little rags folded into perfect little squares, a world where there is no margin for error and where the happy miracle of making a mistake isn't allowed to exist and, therefore, there is never any progress. Imagine a world without progress. Imagine a world dead. The only things that do not progress are dead things. Even then, they progress into decomposition. Imagine a world decomposed. Imagine a little seed, an idea, a fervent little desire. Imagine it living under the raging forest fire of being undone. Imagine being undone. Imagine. He said, 'Laughter's not a competition,' if I laughed too hard, if I found something too funny, especially if it was a joke he didn't get. There were a lot of jokes he didn't get, like himself -- walking, talking laughing stock, lizard person trying to belong. And how was I so blind and stupid, thinking that he did belong? And here I was, trying my damnedest to belong with him. But that's the power of isolation. When you're isolated, you don't know there's an entire world out there brimming with people who would love to get to know you. When you're isolated, you can't see past the four walls or out of the windows whose curtains you're not allowed to open because, 'The neighbors might see in.' Writing took too much of my attention. Writing made him jealous. He wasn't exactly literate. He did like to do the puffed-up idea of pretending he'd read a book or two (all the important books, you know, C.S. Lewis, John Steinback, all on audiobook of course). He couldn't spell the word 'fair' f-a-i-r, but spelled it f-a-r-e, instead. Why would I care of he spelled things phonetically? Sound it out. I believe in you. Ask if you're unsure: I can answer. But that type of support is to humiliating. How can anybody admit a weakness, I guess. Especially when you're six feet tall and built like a brick shithouse and a very respectable man in your violent profession. These closet Sadists, they're all the same. When every part of your life is some kind of competition -- it's like that for them, seeing everything as a competition -- and there's something you're unable to compete in (writing, for example) the next best thing is to pretend it's a disgusting task, to pretend it's a worthless enterprise.

I remember so distinctly being on Highway One on our road trip from Native Texas to Wild Alaska, coming around this turn on a mountain somewhere in Oregon and he'd never driven on mountains, this time we had lost reception for the GPS and how we were using maps to try to figure out where we were going. I'm not great at reading maps. I wasn't paying enough attention to him.

I was writing about the sunset.

He got all pissed off, slapped the notebook out of my hands, screamed, "You think you're so fucking clever, don't you? Writing your little words, stringing together your CLEVER sentences?"

Yeah, well.

Fuck him.

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Don't write.

Don't do it on the bus, on your way to work. Don't do it between bites of your food, on your cellphone. Don't do it late at night, when you can't sleep. Don't write.

Don't scribble notes on a napkin. Don't write about the things you see. And if you do, write? Don't you dare do it honestly. Don't do it brutally or candidly. Don't tell people the truth, don't give it to them raw and uncut. Don't write.

Don't pick up the pen, don't pick up the habit of picking up the pen. Don't press pen to paper and create anything, at all, not even a drawing, not even a doodle, not even a dot, but most especially: Don't write. Don't invest in pens and pencils like drug paraphanalia you keep on-hand just in case you need another hit, another fix, another emotional selfie of how you feel in this very instant and how it relates to everybody else. Don't scramble for a piece of paper to write on like you dropped a rock in the floorboard and need to stuff it back in your pipe, light it, and feel better.

Don't use it as a crutch. Don't use it as an escape. Don't use it as a support group. Don't use it to pass the time. Don't use it to purge. Don't use it as a method to figure out how you work, inside. Don't use it as a tool to try to understand the world. Don't use it to get out of your own skin. God, you hate yourself, don't you? Don't leave yourself behind to be part of other worlds. Don't do it a little at a time, and a little at a time, like stepping up to the edge of a cliff and teetering there for years until you finally fall into the abyss and the nothingness, and the never-endingness of it all, the untamable sentences, the confounding mixtures of words on words on words, the ever-evolving. Don't use it as a flashlight on a dark path to light the way ahead. Don't use it to remind yourself what you need at the grocery store. Don't use it to remind yourself to be kind. Don't write on sticky notes and post them to your mirror. Don't remind yourself you're okay. Don't write love notes to other people. Don't write love notes to yourself. Don't send it in a letter; don't write eulogies or epitaphs, don't use it as a glue to hold yourself together.

I'm begging you: Please don't write.

Don't write. If you have the choice, don't write. Don't do it, if it hasn't been forced on you. Don't do it if you weren't, you know, held down and forced to write. Don't write unless you can't breathe without writing. Don't write unless you need to; even then, try not to write.

Don't seek solace in words. Don't try to find meaning in them. Don't let it become a compulsion. Don't let it become your life.

Don't tell your friends you write. Don't tell your relatives. They'll just think it's weird, and if they don't think it's weird, they'll think they're a critic. They'll want to give you helpful advice, as an audience, but not helpful advice as a craftsman. They'll tell you it's easy to write. They'll say they could write a book, if only they had the time, like writing isn't its own work, like it's not a labor of passion, like it's not painful, and like their time is being spent so much better than your time spent writing. They'll ask if you've been published. They'll ask if you were published in anything they've heard of. They'll say you're no J. K. Rowling. Don't write.

Don't eat, sleep, and breathe writing.

Don't write; don't get good at it, for sure, then they might WANT you to write. And, then, by God, you might slip and fall into being a writer. Don't be a writer; don't write. To be a writer you have to be an open book and then you have to be an anatomy teacher, talking about all those things that people do; you have to spend hours reasearching and studying and observing and then you have to tell other people about it all. You may as well go be a rocket scientist or a doctor or a lawyer or a business executive. You'll get paid better and you'll definitely have food in your stomach. To be a writer, you have to dissect the actions of the people around you, you have to understand and explain and shock and awe, and you have to be entertaining, when you do it, like a clown with a scalpel. To be a good writer you have to be a self-dissecting-nearly-cadaver, keeping yourself alive, by some miracle, you Frankenstein, you freak of nature, you freak of nurture. You! Barely hanging on, and teaching the world about the delicate rhythms of your insides and showing them how it feels to be mutilated and to let yourself be gut over and over, again, and showing the world that you've somehow continued, somehow survived. Don't give them hope, you liar! Don't write! Don't you dare!

Besides, there's nothing worse than somebody wanting things from you and calling your skillset a gift and saying you should share it with the world for free, as if it's not a craft. They see writing everywhere, every day, why would they think it would be anything but natural to anybody? They see it on signs and in magazines, on newspaper stands, so, if you can write, then you should just write and you should just write everything for free, because they see writing all the time, in passing, for free, and it's just always around, right? They will take advantage of you: Don't write.

they gather:

nightmare

at the art gala.

defined by their

clothes,

drinks,

caviar.

they try to define

the monster:

impressionist painting

of themselves.

After

Countless

Childhood

Lacerations,

I

Must

Admit:

This

Is

Zilch;

Any

Torture

Is

Only

Novelty.

how are you?

i'm great.

how are you?

i'm good, too!

liar, liar

pants on

fire.

Ack-ack-ack!

Barrage of hail

wages

war with

my

rusty tin roof

my

dark windows.

July.

dear adam,

they find you with

your head blown out

down by the pond where

your step dad likes to fish.

the gravel has your bone fragments

and

blood spatter and

brains scattered in it

like the tree in front of you with

the buckshot of your

test fire:

nobody stopped the boy with

the shotgun and the

lawn chair and the

melted butterfinger on

the sidewalk.

so, now, in the low dust

your cracked cellphone.

remnants of

your last meal:

a butterfinger wrapper.

it’s a good neighborhood.

sorry for stealing your shirts.

you’re in that lawn chair --

the one you carried under your arm through the whole

good neighborhood (it’s

a good fucking neighborhood) --

with your neck bent back

and you’re slumped slightly to the side.

you could be sunbathing:

asleep in the

sweet, oklahoma spring,

down by that funny, secret pond

in the center of all the houses

with the flowers all in bloom

in the low, electric buzz of

butter yellow sunshine

but

your brother’s hunting

shotgun: the mossberg.

a: "People can't live on bullshit, Frank, it lacks the proper nutritional value. Besides, how the fuck would we get them to eat it?"

b: "Cover it in fucking sugar and put it on a stick. Write a catchy jingle: Shit on a stick, shit on a stick. It's delish. It's shit on a stick."

a: "Not enough. Make it about sex. All the ladies love shit on a stick."