Writing often feels like knocking on silence.  Like, I’m at some mysterious stranger’s door and it is raining outside and I am wet and rumpled (inside and out), hoping the door will open and I will be let in.

   Knock-knock.

   No answer.

   Knock-knock-knock.

   Still no answer.

   Knockknockknockknockknock.

   Great sense of urgency and desperation.

   And so no-answer stings just a little bit more.  That is, the more you want in, the more no-response stings.

   A little bit of ache, a little bit of longing.  What can you do?

   First off, you can stop knocking, you damn fool.

   Who’s that, where’s that voice coming from?

   No answer.

   Goddamn, the entire tiny universe you seem to be trapped in is loaded with silence.  It is a timeless place of hard knocks and no-responses.

   What kind of place is this?  Is this the tower, the tenement, the universe you’ve created?

   And so I ask myself a lot of questions myself and I write.  I knock on silence, religiously.

   Silence is my big brother—my big and sometimes overbearing and monstrously invisible brother.

   Come on silence, let’s sing together.  Let’s dream our little dreams under a big black dome of an umbrella, and listen to the rainfall repeat-pelting its nylon skin. 

   Let us recount:

   Something precious, something borrowed, something blue, something lost, something true.

  There has been so much knocking on silence,

   it has become the ultimate knock-knock joke.

   Knock-knock.

   Who’s there?

   Writer.

   Writer why?

   Knock-knock.

   Who’s there?

   Writer.

   Writer why?

   And on and on, endless repetitions and ribbons of silence. 

   Like razors.

   Like boils.

   Like blisters.

   Like the means by which mercy tries and tries, and fails, to relieve itself

   of dreaming.