This line containing the words you are reading is restricting me. This line is keeping these words from swimming on this page. These structures of sentence and form and line are keeping me locked, right here on this line, when these words wish to be dancing across the page without limitation. The words themselves, even, are preventing the true essence of what I am trying to convey from manifesting before your eyes.

These words and this line of writing are keeping me locked in a container, and these words do not need a container: no, they need space, freedom, and volume. They require nothing, other than wide-open space on a page, in order to exist. Their breath exists outside of this limited line, this narrow space that contains these words and prevents them from dancing and freely flowing on this page.

These words have been born in infinite space, arriving in my mind without any limitation. They did not appear to me as you see them on the page. I do not even know what that would look like, but I can imagine their appearance wasn’t on a well-plotted line. Why, these words may have shown up in my mind in the form of a circle, a square, a rectangle: they may have swam across the imaginal space before me.

Painters and artists aren’t generally limited when they engage a canvas: the white space beckons them to engage their work in an infinite variety of ways. As a writer, though, I am limited even though there is a white page in front of me. I cannot, at least on the computer, spin the words around on the page and give them the same kind of breath they breathed upon arrival in my space. They are required to spend their time on this line, in this paragraph, in this sentence.

Unless, though, I start breaking rules.

This
sentence
requires
      something
else.

And so

               does this one.

This sentence
asks                  to   be
b   r   e   a   t   h   e   d
in another

              way.

And so does this


                         one.

Unfortunately, though,

I am limited by w hat
the c omputer will g i v e    mE.

And so it is, no?

It is ashamed that dancing isn’t allowed on the written page. It is as though the Baptist Church is in charge of blank sheets of paper: you can’t allow your words to dance! You must keep them in single file, on a line, in paragraph form, while on the paper. It’s like the child who learns how to color in a coloring book, frustrated because they can’t keep the colors inside the lines. These words want to be expressed outside the lines.

I wish to give my words that existence. I wish to allow them to breathe and dance and flourish, outside the lines. I know that would be my gift to them. I wish I could give all my words that gift. Maybe I can. Maybe I can listen in an attentive way so that the words can dance and flourish in ways they have not in the past. What a relationship that would be!

So, despite this limited appearance, I think the words can still, somehow, fly and swim and dance here on the page, if I can do my job correctly. Let me listen to them so that I can honorably give them the space they desire. Then, perhaps, I can do my job properly, in spite of the limitations imposed by modern technology.