#its not a feghoot though

[gaast]

Here’s something I wrote today when a coworker sent me a poem he wrote that made me think of a shitty pun. So why not turn it into this?

You never know when you'll get your letter. It can take weeks or months or years. Some people say it depends on the people around you, and it depends on the kinds of things you do. Kind, artistic eyes reading heady, complicated work can help you get approved in a flash. Dull, newspaper eyes reading dull newspaper work can keep you from ever getting your letter.

But once you get it, you drop everything else. I've heard stories of people who were in the middle of custody battles switch their focus to their application. I'm sure you've heard of Sandy O'Brien, hospitalized for a stroke with little hope of recovery, who got his letter just as they were going to move him to hospice care only to witness a miraculous recovery as he set immediately to working to the point where he could fill out his application.

I'm sure that's apocryphal--have you heard of Sandy O'Brien since?--but there's some truth to that, that sometimes you get your letter after something terrible or life-changing happens to you. Even if you've never picked up a pen before in your life, if you lose three family members under different circumstances in one month, a letter might find its way into your mailbox.

It's harder to get your letter the more money and fame you have. Women have an easier time. White people don't. Gay people--it's hard to tell. And this could all just be confirmation bias. "I didn't get a letter yet, so they make it harder for people like me." But it's attitudes like that that make it harder to get the letter, the application that changes your life. Your letter comes--I think--when your insides have twisted into the right knots, when you see yourself as divine body and secular soul, when any job seems as good as any other until you get the one you get. Your letter isn't earned; it comes when everything malleable about you is stamped correctly, pressed into the contours that define the correct shape, lumpen and oblong, that evokes the presence and the absence and the presence-in-absence and absence-in-presence that your license lets you speak.

To get your letter is simply to have affirmed that you are this thing, this organ through which IT can speak, a nameless it that must speak or else die, and it always dies cruelly and pitifully and sorrowfully.

Is it the license that changes you or the getting it? Or does your license get you? Or is it the speaking thing inside you? Or the new shapes you have to make? Something in the mix gets you. Applications are never denied. Licenses are always received, stamped just so, watermarked to prevent counterfeiting, though counterfeits abound. You step out of the office, clutching it in both hands, staring at it in any way but the one you always imagined you would. Your heart sinks just slightly. Why? Why did it sink? you think. You slide your license into your pocket, think about the cop who watched you get your picture taken. Who would rob a place like that? you think. Or is the cop there for the people who leave?

You feel a burden, then. You've got it; now you've got to use it. And using it means using it and using it means speaking and speaking means being wrong and being wrong means hurting but it hurts less people than being right. You're going to choose to try to be right and you will fail and be wrong and think that right is something you can never be, even though you have proven yourself malleable, hot metal beaten with a hammer.

You sit and you'll write and you'll write the ways you always thought you'd write once you got your license but now that you have it it'll all seem wrong. Naive and childish.

I've heard stories of people who wrote nonstop, worked on clandestine stories indistinguishable from those written by licensed people, and as soon as those forgers got licensed they never managed to write again. Even now, I wonder, were I to get a letter, could I read these passages without burning them? I think, perhaps, the only poetry is in fakery.

So I dread opening the mail. I dread reaching the point where the nameless thing whispers to me. I'll continue to write forged writing, I'll continue to betray myself, until--unless--I get my letter to apply for a poetic license.