When I Write a Book…by Robert M. Katzman
Robert M. Katzman’s Amazing Story: http://www.differentslants.com/?p=355
By Robert M. Katzman © July 7, 2013
When the passion is enough
I’m compelled to pick up a pen
Recreate incidents now forgotten
Resurrect the long buried
Populate rooms with them
Put words in their mouths
Editing the dead
***
When I write a book
I know the truth
I know what I wish was true
I know what people said
And what I’ll allow them to say now
I know what they wouldn’t let me say
But, they can’t stop me, anymore
***
Offering a place for strangers to visit
Where the colors aren’t faded
People’s faces unlined
Filled with their ambitions
The casualties of those ambitions
I know all the stories’ beginnings
Their middles
Their ends
***
I say I tell the truth
But the truth can be unbearable
Strangers won’t endure that
They will put my book down
I modify the truth
Tell enough, trim the edges
I make the truth lighter
***
Remembering my stories makes them palpable
Like a bubble in time, I walk around them
All the characters patiently waiting
Each saying their lines
Doing their deeds uninterruptable
Stringless deferential Marionettes
They must wait for me, this time
***
God-like, I know
Allowing the most evil to be less so
Limiting the blows to a believable number
Allowing persons beyond redemption
To seem to possess the possibility
Of actually being loved
Because I am irrationally kind
Because, I must never become like them
***
When I write a book
I recreate a microscopic world
Allowing what happened to be sequential
Not the violent chaos that was real
I put blocks of incidents neatly in order
Bracing myself for what was coming
Politely serving up time, like slices of cake
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