Snowflakes In April

The story begins near the end

And I try to sort out the pieces

Try to figure out the crossword puzzle

Yet words criss cross over too many places

Characters act out of character

Storylines begin to lose their lines

Forevers feel like foreshadowing

Yet the day is forever bright forever blue

Crossed over into multiple intersections

I try to make sense and try to see how to end it

Yet it never really began in the first place

The hero never began his quest

The journey never really began

So how to structure a house without a foundation

So how to fortify a kingdom without a king

So how what do you do with a half-told story five hundred thousand words long

So how do you begin to edit when you simply want to keep adding?

How do you start weeding a field so full of beautiful wildflowers?

This thing chose me I never chose it

To be a storyteller and to see with these eyes

To meet characters at bridges and try to build something with them

To feel where others don’t even begin to start feeling

Another manuscript unfinished and put on the shelf

With some great sentences and wonderful scenes

With some heartfelt stories

But too messy with no audience to share it with

The whole if-only-one-reader-could-be-moved mantra no longer applies

Even if it did for a while

I try to put exclamation points on places that don’t need punctuation

I try to condense and cut

Ultimately I will encase the story and cart it away

Like a coffin that only needs one hand to hold it

These brilliant roads and the places they can take you

Sometimes they bring simple, midnight sighs

That know the morning won’t have anymore words left for it

That know there were already too many words to begin with

And like snowflakes in April

The words melt too fast

And leave no mark where they fell