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April 20, 2015

The Words Won’t Come: A Writer’s Dilemma. {Poem}

garden cress green writing keyboard

 

The words won’t come.

They’ve been pressed out of me like juice out of a grape.

They made good wine, but now they’re gone.

I’m left behind, an empty skin.

 

The words won’t come.

Are they extinct or just endangered?

Locked inside the heart of a bald headed Dodo who rides a nice fat gust, but never lands.

 

The words won’t come because there is nothing left to say.

It’s all been said.

Inside, I am just a feeling, impossible to articulate.

It’s more a color than a word.

Grey.

 

I want to feel that alchemy,

When thought and instinct meet and bypass synapses, pulling words from nowhere,

When the tap tap tap of my fingers is so confident that it can be heard all the way down in the kitchen.

 

I want words to shape the grey—how can I understand it otherwise?

I can’t shift things, move things, transform things unless I know their name.

Everything important has a name.

Many names.

 

The words won’t come in anything but cliches,

Water for chocolate, manna from heaven, black as night.

These words describe other people’s experiences.

Recycled.

 

The words won’t come, but when they do,

(They will, they will)

I’ll hold them tenderly like buttercups.

 

And peer into their glossy yellow center,

Marveling at the tiny mechanisms built in there,

Which somehow turn the sunlight into food.

 

Then I’ll tuck them behind my ear until they wilt,

And I have to search in other fields.

 

 

Relephant Reads:

How to Slay Writer’s Block the Peaceful Warrior Way. ~ Fay Inger

~

Author: Erica Leibrandt

Editor: Renee Jahnke

Image: Lepidium sativum

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