what's a writer anyway?

i call myself a poet, a writer.
can i do that in today's megamedia
culture withoutactively participating in said culture
of reading, writing, tweeting, booking, blogrolling?
  why do i still ask myself
this question? of course i can
because i do.


but does audience really make the writer?


emily wrote for herself. as did...
oh shit jack
i forget the name of the author who buried his texts
in chests after an initial success, publishing only a small
percentage of his work, much of that under a nom  de plume-
and anyway, was that not the point?
success has a way of poisoning the art.


or the art can fade without ping. what i've felt
since the demise of my favorite coffee bbs.
so maybe i never was a writer,
but  a chameleon of words.

i always wanted someone else to do the editing
but that's where the craft enters. trimming  strokes
that got out of bounds, cutting off  limbs of baby alliterations
because they don't push the arc of the story
well enough . anyone can vomit out
an abstract painting but a painter manipulates her input
to get the right color red in her regurgitants.
so a writer has to pick and chose the words to be layed on ...
well paper is so 20th century aint it?
let's just say the right aphorisms to tweet.


i really don't want to  go to tweetville tho.
it's an instantaniety that strikes me as a bit too kardashian
facebook's platform and the fact that mr zuckerberg
cares not a whit for the content except to have his lordly rights
in order to market to you, consumer, what he's told you to crave,
keeps me from making that place a home. it's cluttered and difficult
to navigate as well. that's a personal problem if i wanna
have a wide audience. so i say  nahhhh.

he keeps telling me i oughta be in academia.
i tell him things have changed in ten years.
it's getting more liberal outside the tower
but squeezing tighter inside . the kids that
attend the universities today come from privilege
and they don't like it when their trust fund
sensitivities are challenged by commie pinko ideas.
shut up prof, what are you smokin?
sure there's posers that get all ghetto on yo ass but any
real ganstas or reforming ogs be comin
to the university to get whitified, suburbized.
 so they don't need no social welfare nanny state programming
thankuverymuch. ahem.


still. i write. so i guess like poet, it's one of those categories
that can be open as i like. i guess i'll keep the handle
maybe modify it with free.
i'm a freewriter.

yeh.