..

It is waning and growing further, and time unfolds before me, and I watch myself age and descend, and I understand surely that it must not be. Returning grief and a stab of shame. This is all too familiar.

I am very close to giving it up – all of it… none of it. What is there to give up, really, when this is only a raspy husk. I am haunted daily by a deep, pervading nothing. Time fuses and bends. I know not what day it is, or how long has passed, only that there is an impending pain that comforts in this very numb and silent space.

Again, the same images occur to me. Who am I to confess my feelings, if my mind gifts me unchanging statues, banal scripture? And when will I sail to that other world, the moving and the plenty, to see through new eyes and reinvented language? I am starting to empty and stall. Everywhere, birds are vacating trees.

Surely I am no writer if I find myself muted by all around me… it must be that true poets see poetry in all they are surrounded by, seize words from the air like fish, feel an urgent rush to write about every movement. Yet these days I must convince myself I am someplace else to feel at least sane… in a mind-space like this, how do I write sincere poetry about reality?