Pen

I’d rather be penisless than penless in a given moment.

Don’t get me wrong:
I am fond of the troublemaking little fella with its own zipcode of opinions
and the doors it tends to open, as if some misshapen meaty key,
to stories and adventures beyond my imagining
—an explorer in its own right that
boldly goes where,
    as the delusion of every man imagines,
no man has gone before.

But if you inhabit a body as I do
that connects first through
    minds,
        words,
            attention,
                specificity,
— and the love they enable together as an ongoing, everchanging, relentless surprise,
you may as well ask for a pen first,

perhaps not to be stroked literally,
like some gun owners apparently do,
but witnessed in what it creates.

Because this writ-on-water mind of mine
cannot hold, unaided, more than a few words in clear sequence.
So, the pen is a friend to keep them with me,
a shepherd of infinite patience.

And not some electronic screen,
not because I don’t rely on them, I do,
but because in beginnings a pen lets me err faster
— the scratches and scribbles of countless mistakes visible
after the tornado of ideas has passed over the paper.

Every concert I have ever been to,
every rain that ever knocked on my window,
every face that gave me the gift of its infinity,
every impossible hope of defiant kindness,
urges me to write.

So, a pen, yes, first and foremost.
As a witness to such moments
and as an invitation to
attentive minds clad in whatever bodies they may arrive in.

As if to say:
Fuck my mind first
— or not at all.

Melih Sener