If you promise not to tell, I will tell you a secret.  I wrote for 3 hours and came up with nothing to write.  But I am nothing if not inventive, and I am taking a class in innovative writing where I fell in love with a book called “Reality Hunger” by David Shields which introduced me to collage as writing (as opposed to collage as art)(but which can include art – because it’s collage, no matter how you parse it) and the concept of using other folks’ writing without attribution (horrors!  except I am a visual artist too and I know we steal from each other All.The.Time), but his editor made him attribute (in the back of the book) and so it became a game to see whether it was his writing or someone else’s and I wasn’t really surprised to learn that my favorite passages were all his (because any kind of art is energy and we are attracted to certain energy and we recognize it subconsciously, unconsciously or even consciously); all by way of saying that my poem today is a collage (and I have the attributions at the bottom.  Only this opening paragraph – intentionally written the way it is, is mine).

**

I don’t know where to begin because I have nothing to say, yet I know that before long I will sound as if I’m on a crusade. 

The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.

1. The Book of Secrets 

2. I have wasted my life, I have wasted it gladly, remorsefully, willingly, and in the full knowledge there were many things that would not have been different, or would have been better off, had they been left unsaid.

3. Every person has a secret, many die without finding it.

4. Sometimes it’s not your secret to tell.

5. Tell the truth but tell it slant.

6. Don’t you ever want to have just one thing that no one else knows about, so no one can ruin it for you?

7. I have grown to love secrecy.

8. All families have their secrets, most people would never know them, but they know there are spaces, gaps where answers should be, where someone should have sat. We all have our secrets.

9. We are bound by the secrets we share.

10. The person who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear.

11. Nothing stays secret forever.

12. I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.

13. At some point the secret itself becomes irrelevant.  The fact that you kept it does not.

14. Our suffering lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak, born in the moments we accumulated silent things within us.

15. You’re only as sick as your secrets

16. Reader:  Dear Mr. Snicket – what is the best way to keep a secret?  Lemony Snicket – tell it to everyone you know but pretend you are kidding.

Opening Sentence:  Mary Ruefle; following sentence Vicor Shklovsky; 1.  Loreena McKinnet (album); 2. Mary Ruefle; 3. Mallarme’; 4.  Stephanie Meyer (New Moon); 5.  Emily Dickinson; 6. Lula Sales (This Song Will Save Your Life); .  Oscar Wilde (Picture of Dorian Gray); 8.  Cecelia Ahern (The Book of Tomorrow); 9.  Zoe Heller; 10. Cormac McCarthy; 11.  Jennifer Hubbard; 12.  Rainer Marie Rike; 13.  Sara Gruen (Water for Elephants); 14.  Gaston Bachelard (Water and Dreams); 15.  Alcoholics Anonymous; 16. Lemony Snicket.