The Pen and The Paper are Calling

I've been kidnapped, it would seem, by words.  I woke up late today (was out all night playing with Jan, Walter, Kia, Fike, Cindy, Dessy, and others) and I spent the day in the library reading.  John Connelly short stories (Nocturnes, is the book, I'll Nook it soon.) and a book Jan gave me as a present, Martha Peake.  I came home and read poetry.  By everyone, just poetry.  I'm starving for it.  I need it.  Happy, and sad, and nonsense, I just need it.  I wrote a little too, but mostly I've been riding this wave of words.  

Jan and I had coffee in the library, and we talked about music.  I now have A LOT of new bands to enjoy, and I'm really looking forward to them.  Most of Jan's music seems to have a narrative involved.  The albums tend to be based on stories, or on lost cities that were found, or old haunted houses, or something.  Truthfully, it sets me on fire to think about.  I'm not sure why, but more and more, stories are becoming a flame inside me.  

I've always been a writer, but it's come in flashes and bursts.  When I was a child, I would often have to beg a pen from my father and write words and phrases on whatever I could find around me; napkins, receipts, my own hands.  Sometimes a story would follow me for a while, and I would dash some notes down, but I finished little.  I wrote a lot of poetry, not all of it bad, but the stories weren't the important part. It was just the words, and they way they sounded and felt.

But now there's more.  The idea of a story takes me up and shakes me around.  Maybe I've just lived more life, more complex joys and darker pains, but it's about more than the words now.  And I want to read, ingest, learn learn learn.  I want to have a poem for every situation, I want to read the words of great men long dead.  I don't know why, but I hunger for this more now than I ever have.  And I have long been a lover of literature, of poetry, of paper and ink.