mouseluva

I'm a cinder cone turned caldera, an empty plot of land - planning permission was a long, long fight. I'm trying to face the music but every time I look it's too quiet to hear and I'm striving to be respectable as the fragments of my mind spiral away and the ink blots on my collarbones spread to stains

How do I make words happen when every time I approach that core my feelings slip from my hands like wet soap and the tighter I grasp, the faster it falls. So humour becomes detritus, the plug in my crater lake; and I become a caldera. With volcanoes at my rim, and the scars of prehistoric lava flows, and a deep, deep ocean. I show my therapist the jet skis parked at my shore, and the tranquil fishermen, and I hope she won't ask how very cold it is at the bottom.

When did my words abandon me? My pencil flipped from my palm and colour came from my fingertips and it blotted them all out I used to be a blacksmith, wordsmith, except it was so natural, so gentle, like milk and honey spilling from my mind. Oozing, leaking, bleeding emotive imagery. I could make your mind go places with but a hint. Listen: remember pools of orange lamplight with the hand of a lover? Remember lines and lines of text or powder or splits in the skin of what it means to be human. Remember the whiplash of my changing rhythms? Listen: I once could make the voice in your head do whatever I wanted. Like this: we're having a

Words used to drip from my fingers; but now my pain is worth so. much. more You think suicide will change you It leaves you a ghost; And something is gone; And something has come; but after months your pain becomes so much more.

I used to wonder how awful it would be to have no words. But now they have dripped dripped dripped out of my fingertips and through his spine; and all the metaphors about enjambment and autumn are gone; and all I have left is the same old poetry that I was never any good at.