Fats; a starving rigor; a curi­ous man admires the form of his wife’s curl­ing iron: these are the ele­ments of writing.

An enchaîne­ment of stolen bod­ies, rearranged; dis­em­boweled ideas; an eye becomes an item, or an index, a fren­zied move­ment of the ber­ga­masca: these are the forms of language.

My task as a writer is that of the mad bird keeper; the pen is the key; release the song­birds from their cages!

Over many a morning’s cof­fee have I pondered the syn­tax of birds. I think also of the rhythm of auto­mo­biles and the breath­ing of the things I eat and drink. I won­der the name of the birds in the bird lan­guage when I see them.

I find solace in leathered foot­steps, magic in tiny match­boxes, answers in a lover’s heart­beat; and yet; what hap­pens when music becomes flat and geo­met­ric, when col­ors migrate into lurid ambi­gu­ity … one faces the ter­ror of speech, the tear­ful­ness of love poetry, O red death.

Curi­ous to think of Émile Zola; stor­ies bur­ied beneath sterile schema; tragedy as a med­ical text. And curi­ous to think of the night­mares of Kafka, death of Kharms, sex­less­ness of the mad Artaud.

I find a pain in writ­ing. It is an ascetic work. Only when I write do I ever feel a draft about my feet, an inex­or­able feel­ing. And yet I can­not escape the fore­see­able derange­ment of the senses.

My meth­ods involve a simple set of qual­it­ies, and they are: memor­ies of syn­agogues, enclosed fields, old pho­to­graphs, sui­cides, received ideas. I reward myself for hun­ger, I am recept­ive to wounds, and some­times it is the anger of these things that I unload upon my writing.

I dis­value sleep, mis­un­der­stand money: these are the unten­able secrets of my pas­sion for text.

My inspir­a­tions are: myth­ical bio­graph­ies of desert fath­ers, sat­ur­ated images of cry­ing moth­ers, eulo­gies for lost and dying children.

I am never sat­is­fied in fin­ish­ing a piece. I avoid the empty cor­ridors of a final mark of punc­tu­ation; and yet I fill pages in the frenzy of clut­ter­ing an empty piece of mind.

I am not so metic­u­lous as to assign col­ors to vow­els; and yet I think of the fic­tional female in terms of the white­ness of her teeth and the depth of her col­lar­bone: to me, these are rav­ish­ing, fant­astic ideas. Some­times they are the only ideas I have.

The act of writ­ing is the emu­la­tion of instant­an­eous mod­els, the re-evaluation of an expir­ing gram­mar, the artic­u­la­tion of a soci­etal eroticism.

Most import­ant is that I know noth­ing. I write to get the insects out; I put them on a paper; I tran­scribe pages of a girl’s per­fume; I change the color of things with my mind. I tear things apart. I close a book as a meditation.

Bobby Alter is the win­ner of Lam­in­a­tion Colony’s This is not not a Con­test, and this appear­ance on Writers’ Bloc is one of his prizes. His win­ning story is called The car­di­ovasc, and he has also just star­ted a blog at hungerjournal.blogspot.com.