Gaze fixated on the glowing screen before me,
Fingers numb, wrists aching, eyes weary and sore
From these four-or-so hours hunched over,
A slave to agitations of this overtired mind
Spinning with ideas and artistic fancies,
The desire to weave words together with ease
Like the most exquisitely simple of daisy chains
Pulsating unrealistically at the back of my wrung-out brain.


Dictionaries are sacred, the thesaurus my Bible, but
With every clock-tick I spiral further down the murky cliché tunnel;
Somewhere in the distance my orb of a muse flickers, a beacon,
Albeit one on the verge of suffocation from this sweeping fatigue,
A thumb crudely extinguishing my sole flame of insight.
I cling to all potential threads of inspiration:
A whispered word, a hidden smile, a fleeting scent, a lingering touch,
But all are torn out of my grasping hands,
Hurled into the muddy quagmire of sleep deprivation.


I desperately fish for words in the deepest chasms of intellect,
Roll them across my tongue, spew them onto paper,
Hack and slash away: deleting here, splicing there,
Until the whole mess is so knotted and snarled
That it would be kinder to put this sorry disaster of a poem
Out of its misery, end its torture at my clumsy fingertips.
Which I do; then begin again.


Why, you might query?
Such are the daily struggles of a writer,
And when, finally, after the hours of tears and toil, the words finally flow,
Like inky waves caressing pure white sand;
Yes, that moment is true love’s sister,
The past is mere adverse memory.