He woke up and started writing




He woke up and started writing as if writing
were all you had to do to make yourself a writer, looking
out the window and describing what you see.
He saw an alley.
Garbage cans. Their nobler cousins, recycling bins.
Cables emanating from houses and poles, cable TV cable, electric cable (all symbols),
and of course the crumbling blacktop surface of the alley itself (motif).

Oh, and the late-model sedan swinging suddenly into the alley (foreshadowing).

This sounded good to him as he wrote.

He broke for breakfast and thought of Hemingway,
or at least of Hemingway’s men, and the
simple sentences of the indecipherable men filled with
depth of loss and manliness. Mostly manliness. A deep
depth of manliness, of hunting and of fishing and of fighting and
of not using contractions when speaking.
Plus a depth of not talking much coupled with a shallowness of vocabulary.

He didn’t know why he thought of Hemingway at breakfast.

Eating breakfast made him sleepy. When he went back to writing,
it was in the blank just-awake mind of one almost dreaming, of one
who has drunk coffee but not yet felt its effects.
He looked at the alley poem, and even in that state knew it was crap,
even laughed at himself and the mundane alley.
It was a knowing laugh, a sardonic laugh, the laugh of a writer,
a worldly man who deeply understands
the irony of thinking of Hemingway at breakfast.
He knowingly thought to himself,
“‘Hemingway at Breakfast.’ Sounds like a postmodernist abstract painting,”

This, he thought, was a writerly thought. And he decided that writerly thoughts
were even better than actually writing, because anybody could write, anybody,
but only writers could have writerly thoughts.
Like Hemingway.