He sits at his desk, hunched over and breathless. Gasps rush by his lips and shake him like the cold. His eyes burn behind the glass of his lenses. It is three A.M. and the poem at his fingertips won’t let him go.
The words crash through him like a car wreck.
Every few lines, he reaches away from the page, touching the wood desk beneath them.
Only for a moment.
A small plea for good luck, that the sadness and torturous emotions his ink is revealing will steer clear of his dreams.
The poem begins to slow. He watches it finish. His fingers achy and gnarled around the pen. His focus is one with the pen tip. A writer’s meditation.
His shaking settles, his breathing calms, and his heart slows.
He reads his words as if for the first time, like a ghost that relives it’s death.
His brow throbs. His cheeks are damp.
He lays his pen on the desk and his body on the bed.
Writing is such a physical profession.
–JW