LJIdol / LPF: Week 5: Not My First Rodeo

On a sunny afternoon 

A young witch is cleaning her cauldron 

Thinking about unfinished projects

Notice: the sewing machine in it’s case 

Notice: the shelf of books waiting to be read

Notice: the typewriter 

 

She’s better than this, she thinks when she has a premonition
 

Herself; later that night trying to reach a deadline 

Plundering her own journals for profound one liners

Sitting on the bed surrounded by so many pocket sized notebooks

Bindings worn thorn, filled with paragraphs of run on sentences 

In multicolored ink

 

This is called procrastinating 

She is told

As she cleans the cauldron 

To avoid the pen

 

Doesn't chase the plot bunnies under the bed

Even though words are her addiction

 

She contemplates fabric and stitches, instead

 

The half made skirt wrapped up just so 

in paper 

in a box, 

also under the bed

 

Needles trailing at the end of threads- seems unfinished 

 

She knows she is only digger her soul deeper into karmic debt 

by not giving proper action to anything she truly desired

 

Scraping ashes off cast iron

She sprinkles in a layer of black powder and sweet incense

 

Always starting over

Always a new beginning 

 

She believes in impossible dreams

Secretly revels in happily ever afters 

and loves rainy days

And coffee 
 

And baking magic into cookies

And flying broomsticks 

She takes too many pictures of the delightfully ephemeral sky

 

She collects new words, 

like matchsticks waiting to be struck

 

 

But who am I kidding?

Because you already know that the SHE in this story is ME

 

And most of the time 

*I*

have the bad habit of writing in first person

 

And you (yes you) 

can hear this bird singing spitting rhymes

Sometimes
Even into a microphone

Up on a stage

 

But mostly

Only ever when she thinks no one is listening 

 

Because
no one 

Ever is 

Ever really 

Doing anything

 

Except living in their own story

 

Like most of you reading this 

who have gathered to share this thing we call art 

 

You know, how like 

 

the not-so-young-anymore-actually witch in THIS story

got too comfortable living out of boxes 
because she grew up mostly on the run 

because her mama couldn't always pay the rent

 

Or how she became an avid reader

As a way to escape reality 
 

Or how cleaning the cauldron becomes a metaphor 

 

And how long it took to write 

and then rewrite and then decide to share 

this prose

 

Or even how I thought about you while writing this
 

And how I came a long way to be who I am today

 

But truly who of us hasn't?

 

 

Before you go think of your favorite color, if everyone who reads this thinks of their color, after awhile we will have manifested a rainbow