When I read Bradbury, I write like a train runs. In bursts. I am quiet, silent in the station, then I've got somewhere to go and Bam! The words are out before I've taken a breath and it's a quarter till midnight and I'm wondering where the last two hours went. The train hit them, and now they are flat on their backs slid halfway under a railroad tie that belts them down, waiting for another idea to plummet past, the afterthought, the caboose, and run them down all over again.

The keyboard sounds like the presto clip of the steam engine flying by and when I'm done, there's that sound that comes afterward. Silence. Silence is a sound. I could bottle it up and sell it, if that was my chosen profession, but it's not because I'd miss the nights on the train.

The pages of a Bradbury always smell like the thoughts of everyone who's ever read them. Magic hides between the (deceptively) neat, clean little lines of black on white. They look so perfect there on the page, but then they sweep up in little arcs and straight into my head through my ear, and suddenly I'm a pile of run-on sentences with commas where there should be periods, and where there should be commas, nothing at all! And they are the most glorious run-ons you've ever seen, dashing down the keyboard track quicker than the eye can follow.

J. D. Salinger can stop trains with his bare hands. I take my car instead. The sentences are cut at stoplights, the shining red circles that make me feel small inside. Like all I am is another few square feet of street.

The road I drive down every day is lined with potholes. Kerthunk. One day, the holes had been patched up with black tar. They next day, they were back.

Maybe what I say isn't the story. The story is there and I'm just punching holes in the paper for it to shine through. That may just be wishful thinking, though. I don't know. Probably the words are black at the bottom like potholes.

It's safer to pause at stoplights. And at periods.

Because sometimes if there's an empty intersection, a car might go by. Sometimes. Sometimes not.

Sometimes, after watching a really good movie, I get started on a dialogue and find myself on a role.

“Dialogues. Or sometimes monologues. Really, any kind of log. They just get rolling...”

“Believe me, I know.”

“And then I can't--”

“--stop. Yes, I know.”

“I can't explain it. It's just that when you can picture them, standing there, wide-eyed and earnest... You can't stop until they've completed their conversation, quieted their quarreling...”

“Wrapped up their rant... There's no need to rant.”

“I'm not--”

“Not yet. I've learned to cut you off early.”

And poetry makes me write in memories. Dark Shadows, inky. The swelling of the blood from a pen I split with my persistent gnawing, flowing over the etched-out images that I almost recall... sometime... long ago...

But the memories, they aren't my own. Who am I to have memories? What am I made of?

Just paper,

ink,

and mirrors.