Writer's Block

It's not good in here
not at all good inside your head:
this desert that dries up stories
bleaches their bones
leaves nothing but petroglyphs and
tumbling sand.
Too many words taking flight--
a beating of wings and webbed feet
and you must capture them all and pin them
to the single wire of a sentence
which would lead to someplace that makes sense.

They say words are the things that hold us together
and language makes us what we are.
This is your life's work: go ye into the desert
into the brazen sun and the unforgiving dark
suck up water from the dust
and spit it back out to grow the soul of the world.

Of course it is all nonsense; you
should never have chosen this career
and now you wish you were twenty-seven again
living your life circa the 60's
freeloving it up with all the rest;
and they weren't using latex, baby
it was vinyl all the way.
It was Hendrix and Joplin and Morrison
and you could feel every. single. thing.
People listened like the world was on fire
while they burned up angels
and smoked their wings.

Or maybe that's not your style
and you wish to be entirely elsewhere;
the middle of the Pacific perhaps
climbing high up the masts of a tall ship
to watch a storm bellying over the horizon.
You could find your muse that way
or if not, then simply die happily
swan-diving into oblivion.

Either way the words lead you onward
flying ahead like a flock of geese
their wild wings beating, and beating,
and beating the shit out of whatever it was
you thought you had to say. All you can do
is fly after them, capturing one and the next
pinning them down
stringing them to the wire of a sentence
that will show us where we need to go.



©KB 5/2015