Writing Advice From Papa Hemingway

Papa Hemingway taught me one thing.

Correction,

Papa taught me a whole lot,

But he taught me one thing about writing.

Writing is as simple and as hard

As sitting down with pen and paper

And writing the truest sentence you’ve ever said.

And then you write another.

And another

And you fill up the page with truth

And write books full of truth

Fill volumes and libraries with truth.

It doesn’t have to be real

But it does have to be true.

And so I sat down to write the truest thing I’ve ever said.

Write the truest sentence I’ve ever told anyone

Let alone the pen and paper I write these poems on.

And this is what came out.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me.

I don’t know what it is that makes this heart broken

I don’t know what it is that makes this brain

Work in ways no one quite understands.

I don’t know what it is that makes this poetry thing

More real than any words I’ve ever spoken.

I just know something in my past is what makes it.

There is something that happened in the way back

That made me different.

That made me separate.

That made me listen to Papa Hemingway more than my contemporaries.

That made me spend nights holed up in classrooms

Spitting out words I can’t say aloud

But I can spew into microphones

That makes that act of standing on stage

Feel like the most private and intimate moment of my life.

Because I come from a long history of white washers.

Of black places at the back of the brain.

A history of unfinished puzzles

And I don’t know what pieces are missing.

I don’t know if there are hands grabbing and pulling from the blackness of that childhood

I don’t know if its words spat in my eyes that I couldn’t let rattle through the years.

I don’t know if its lashes and scars covered up by new skin and dead brain cells.

All I know is that I don’t know what’s wrong with me.

I don’t know what the combination of words and events

That will open this 7^th grade gym locker of a heart

Will paint across this billboard of my life.

But most of all I don’t care.

I won’t use my past as a fishing hole.

Casting and recasting into the blackness

Trying to pull out new aortas still pumping with blood and black swamp water.

I won’t smear that blood across pages

Exclaiming for the world to see just how broken I am.

Because everyone’s got problems.

You’ve got problems

I’ve got problems.

Papa Hemingway had problems.

He had a ton of problems.

His problems were what dragged him down.

But I will not let my problems take over.

I will remain what they call an unfinished puzzle

Because it looks like a mosaic to me.

I am not what happened to me

But who I’ve become.

I will not spread old blood across the fields and stages of the world

Because that’s not the blood of who I am now.

It doesn’t smell like the A positive pumping through my veins right now.

So here it is

Ready for you and all the world to hear and digest

I don’t know what’s wrong with me.

But I do know

It doesn’t matter.

Because who I am now

Is not the blank spaces.