I think linear storytelling is boring, I don’t do it well. I am still hungover from yesterday’s too-many-specifics. It seemed important to tell you that story—the painting’s self-assertion stunned me!—but I do not know that it was really worth it in the end. It cost me a lot of words, and for what? I am a poet, I am not a novelist! I prefer abstract concepts to details, I am a broad-strokes kind of woman, I do not go in for the multitude of careful brushstrokes that eventually add up to something—something small, like a saucer. I do not have the patience for that! One two three! broad strokes and I am finished. Not really, but…it would seem that way. Let me tell you something. I buried everything beneath that avalanche of words! Who will uncover all the buried better ones? No one, that’s who. But what was I to do? I had a story to tell! I know, I know, I did not tell it well. I remember when I was a poet, how much I loved writing poetry. It was a fire within me. It was a summer heat storm, lighting me up silently. There is no experience I have loved more than that of writing poetry when I was on fire with it, when I was electric with the light of it, when we were in our embrace. There were times when poems came whole cloth out of nowhere, and it is why I believe, poetry is why I believe in God. Lengthy, word-beclotted blog posts are not. Yet here I sit, making my prosaic litanies nonetheless. But why? Why do I do it? Well, I have my reasons. They have to do with writing, and with painting, with record-keeping and with storytelling. They have to do with compulsion and with love, with fealty and continuity and selfhood. Those are the broad strokes of why I return to this day after day. They are like empty amphorae, however, absent of specifics. You will have noticed this is absent of specifics? Here is one specific for you, for I know they are like snacks: I am sorry, I cannot come up with one.