Andromeda, Thinking of Men

Now I put my faith in astrology. Not the heavens, but their turning
and the points of light that break the void. Let me assure you
though, it’s all chaos up there, and they’re only myths I whisper.
Tell me I’m more beautiful than the Nereids. I’m not afraid,
I stopped believing in monsters, and chairs.

I’d still like you to save me though, to find me by the shore in chains.
I know it’s not very modern to want for you to come to me
here, bringing me the heads of the women you loved before.
Carry them over your back until you find me on the rocks,
you don’t know how long I’ve thought of men.

Before you came it was only uncles with jewels and hands,
but we can put that behind us once you’ve loosened things up.
I’ll let you run your finger along my gums, they say you can learn
a lot from the teeth. They’ll tell you things if you touch them right.
I really am eager to meet you, you know.

I told you it’s the turning, not the heavens themselves and it’s true.
The stars have houses we can’t see and they have ways of returning
like whales and certain turtles to the places they know. The stars are
faithful, and so I am too. Because I know you’ll come back to me
if I just put myself out there. Out here.

You can read these lists as much as you'd like but they won't help you unless you let them.

It's not that you're ignoring their words or pretending the diagnostics are faulty because they've never really been inside you the way that only you could ever be, because what's the point of thinking about things that way. It's exclusionary at the deepest level. It's elitist. It's more about this reluctance to apply these ideas to your own mode of being because you just don't really know what your own mode of being is. Can you paint a landscape with language? Is that even something you're concerned with?

Though even this is evasive and intellectually dishonest. The common theme running through every entry is just that you need to write to be a writer and that you aren't going to get better if you aren't doing it. Thinking about writing isn't practice and you need to stop pretending that it is. You can hone these critical skills as much as you'd like, train yourself to be able to really finely dissect the anatomy of these things, but do you really expect that to help you create? Does the anatomist become a better sculptor or does he just become more aware of the mistakes in the marble; the problems inherent in these materials?