Ralph Pullins

You painted my hands with violence, painted them to be bludgeons, crude and scarred. You painted my heart the color of despair, the sickly yellow of self loathing. I was untouched at first, Tabula Rasa, waiting for the artist's hands to tell me who I was, to tell me what I will be, but I didn't get an artist, I didn't get a saint. You showed me who I was, who I would be.  You did this, and then you handed me the brush and told me to keep painting.  My hands are not an artist's hands, they are thick and blunt, the hands of a fighter, of a brute, of a monster, I took the brush and slopped paint over everything you showed me, layer over layer, tried to cover the worst, hide it from view, and sometimes I could convince myself that it wasn't there at all, but in vino veritas , and some things cannot be hidden, some stains cannot be washed away. You painted my hands with violence, black and red with rage, you painted my face into a leering jack o lantern and now what can

So as many of you must know, November is National Novel Writing Month and writers everywhere get all wound up and try to knock out a novel in a month.  It is abbreviated as NaNoWriMo or something stupid, presumably an event created by and intended for writers and that's the best thing that they could come up with?  The world's most garbage portmanteau?  Writing circles generally call it Nano, which is only marginally better, but at least its shorter.  I never do it because November is a terrible month to attempt to do anything other than watch football and dream of turkey and mashed potatoes and whatnot.  Who has time to sit down at the keys in November? I don't know about y'all, but I haven't been able to do jack shit creatively in the last year, what with the pandemic and the election and protests and civil unrest and the many and varied other goddamn attacks on my peace and sanity and holy shit it was all I could do to hold it together and not run screaming out o