Charles Jensen | Writer

Today I declare myself a prose writer. There. I said it. I’m not writing any more poems. Well, I might write poems, but they will be secret poems. I am distancing myself from line breaks as gingerly as the GOP might sidestep Mark Foley. I’m not trying to make a scene but I am clearly making a scene.

I don’t know why I keep writing books. I’m tired of writing books, tired of throwing away drafts and drafts and drafts of books. I have single-handedly deforested portions of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin in this process. I must be stopped. Contact your legislator and file some kind of action item. Invent a new buzz word that demonizes me. Invalidate me. You may even tell your friends that my incompetence is of little interest to you. I’m fine with that.

There are days when I wake up in the failures I wore the night before, and I know then it’s because they’ve exhausted me, those mistakes, and I passed out before I could even find a way out of them. I’m a prostitute of disappointment.