you can't stop

my heart from turning
inside out
try to stop my world from turning
inside out

My theme song for early morning sessions of wrestling with revisions and rewrites. The Mighty Lemon Drops wrote it for me. Just for me. Really.

The video captures perfectly that twitching-under-the-table moment each day at 5am, when I open the folder and meet my manuscript again.

Clutching on the last straw
Seeing things I've never saw
Must be time I fell
Down to a place I didn't know too well

I watch the feet walk by, the legs engage and disengage with total certainty, from floor level. I look up at finished people, doing finished dances, and try to stay connected to this amorphous thing emerging from between my shoulderblades. One word at a time. I let the work come at me like everyone I've ever loved, everyone I've ever lost (1).

you can't stop my heart from turning
inside out
try to stop my world from turning
inside out

Sometimes, if I'm lucky, the work is suddenly upright, players in place on the stage, looking quizzically down at me like

Get off the floor, drama queen - we've got a set to do.

(1) Props to Junot Diaz for this haunting line, borrowed from his blurb for Tania James' Atlas of Unknowns