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I feel like I should apologize...
It has come to my attention that I can be offensive. Which got me thinking...why do I write the way I do? Sometimes it's because I mishear a song lyric and turn it into a winding, post-modernesque street-lamp poem. Sometimes it's because I want to praise or worship. Mostly, I can't help it.
Sometimes, though, my writing can more like a soap box - and a glimmery-clean one at that. But - woe to me if I don't! - I write. It is more than just your typical inner drive to express those mushy-down depths that would otherwise tangle and knot around your heart. It is more than just an up-and-out effort to release the strangle-hold grip of yet unspoken experience. It is a desire to shake the world awake, much beyond the make-you-think. There is a certain focus and attention that anger and offense brings to a subject, the kind that usually births action, or at least a reaction, but enough to spark. There is a sharpening of one's mind and intellect when he's getting hot-in-the-face furious, and it turns into more than just receiving an argument. This is what I'm after.

We need to start paying attention...
I don't like offending anyone as much as the next guy, but if that is how people like their coffee, then so be it. I realize I run the great (read: thin ice) risk of sounding pretentious, but I want people to wake up! I don't necessarily agree with everything I write (which may be a strenuous but beneficial exercise in itself), but we have to start thinking - not for thought itself, but for the sake of action! Capriciousness is a blunt-force tool of the weak - we need our strong opinions for the dousing of those otherwise under-developed political, cultural, economic, and religious flames. I write to induce soul-searching - what do I really think about this? - and sometimes do it in a way that boils. But, there are things that shouldn't be ignored any longer, and if I've produced anger, I've produced charged-so-you-can-charge! thought.
So, I guess I won't apologize...
We need the nineteen seventies shakers, and those nineteen nineties moshers in the comparatively philosophical world. We didn't start this fire, but I don't want to stand around and let it get weak. This is not a critical diatribe against the apathetic and the dilapidated - I have no right to judge - but a hopeful shout-out for voice, for song, and for jump.
This gets me thinking so that we can get going.

Learn more about this author, Megan Risley.
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