Don't do this, Sting!

Sting is such a dick.*

He tried to completely ruin writing for me. He made me feel tremendous guilt about almost everything I have ever composed. Certainly about everything I have ever posted on this stupid blog.

I saw some interview with him, and they were asking about this new Broadway play of his. I forget what it’s called. Something about ships. He seems to love the nautical life. He’s always singing about it. It’s because he grew up on a shipyard, as I learned in the interview. They were having him talk all about his life. His career, his youth, his family. Sting’s story is an interesting one.

He also talked about this big writing hiatus he took at one point in his career. He couldn’t put out a single song for 7 years. What initiated the block was a realization that everything he had written had always been about himself. He called himself a self-centered artist. He couldn’t stand it. He looked back on everything he had produced to that point, and they were all the story of Sting. It disgusted him. He couldn’t generate a thought without it being the same sorry story. So he stopped thinking.

This is why the guy is a dick. It is not just his pointy head and the phallic face. It is his bold-faced effrontery to call out my preferred style of writing. He tried to make me feel like a conceited, querulous little butthole for just about every word I have ever typed. Everything I write is about me. My thoughts, my ideas, my perceptions, my frustrations, my confusions. All mine. I’m a self-centered writer, for sure. I can’t possibly deny that. (It’s called The Last Ship. I just remembered.)

Sting almost got me to fall into his guilt game. I was ready to never write a damned thing again, unless I could figure out a way to not write about myself. But everything I think comes from me, so everything I write comes from me. How could it not?

But here’s my idea. I think it is what Sting missed. Maybe thinking these things are mine is the only self-centered thing about the process. Maybe I am not writing about myself, but I am writing about the human experience.

These things are bigger than me. Because really, in the grand scheme of things, I am so tiny and insignificant. To think otherwise would be naïve, and quite self-centered. To think I am the only one who has ever had these thoughts, ideas, perceptions, frustrations, confusions would be egotistic, and just absurd. To call them mine would be a violation to the personhood of anyone who has ever shared them with me. I put a lot of faith in the fact that when I write, someone will connect with what I am writing. It's not an unreasonable assumption, because what I write is not mine.

I am not writing my story. I am writing a story. It is one of billions, but it is also one of just one much greater story. I am but a branch in the story of a tree. And the story of the tree is much stronger, and far more beautiful than the story of the branch. It is the sways of the tree that people stop to admire.

The tree is the story of the world. The story of human experience. I am just telling this story in my voice, because it is the only one that I have.

F you Sting. I’m gonna keep on writing this story. I just won’t call it mine.

a poem about poems

This is a poem about poems--

About how all poems tell the same story.

They tell the story of fear, of courage, of life,

The story of one thing meaning whatever it needs to mean for you.

I wanted to write a poem about roses--

About their simple beauty.

I wanted to write how their petals are perfect,

Until you examine them closely,

And how this reveals a spot here, a blemish there—

Hidden signs of their dying.

I wanted to write how all the animals gather around the roses,

Like children gather around a fire.

It is the wonder of it all that draws them in.

They get close, but are sharply repelled by the beauty of the roses

Working against their own.

I wanted to write this poem.

I realized it has already been written.

When one has truly looked at a rose,

Looked through what it is supposed to be,

And stared into the eyes of what it really is--

When one has looked at the rose in this way,

We all have.

This is a poem about people. About how we all tell the same story.

We tell the story of fear, of courage, of life,

The story of one person being exactly what she or he needs to be for you.

A poem about roses, wondering, dying, learning, living,

About poems,

I now understand, is a poem about us.

*For the record, I have no problem with Sting. I think he is a fine human, and I really like a lot of his music.