Writer's Block

"To be or not to be that is the question"

How soft these words reverberate in time

In space-

How mute they mock my meager skills in verse

While the vastness of a blank page gives me pause

Puzzles the will-

No, no I am no Prince Hamlet, but a rumpled fool with an inkless pen

A nameless, voiceless skull shoveled from the grave

Then mocked by lips which kissed and chided

And cast to piles of broken earth to sleep,

Perchance to dream-

****

Perchance to dream a dream of days gone by

When we would drive those half-deserted highways

The statewide byways-

We'd find that smoke-filled truck stop diner

And we'd light Pals like funeral pyres

Pouring coffee-

Forcing smears of colored pencil on blank paper

Or curved lines of black ink between spiral binds of blue lines

Our lives measured out in day-old carafes of stale grounds

And cooling ash littered with yellow-orange stumps,

Which leaned together -

***

Leaning while their pale tendrils stretched up like incense

Rising with the prayers of empty men

Blank pages-

Waiting for inspired strokes of light

To fill them with color and living words, and yet

It’s blank-

The myriad worlds of was and is and is to come

Confounded by the eternity in a blank page

Which pleads for the Creator to create a new work

Knowing it can make nothing by itself

Just hoping to be filled-