Writers of the Damned

Writing is something I enjoy when I'm going with the flow and flowing with a go. So easily do the words slip and slide out from the little nooks and crannies of my soul. How simply does my literary muse, who praces around naked flaunting her bold beautiful perfect body, in the playground of my mind sensually caress those words from my tortured and twisted mind like a master guitarist stroking those clear liquid notes from a cheap plywood guitar. Expressions of divine clarity fall upon my head like a tropical shower leaving me soaked to the bone, but fresh, alive and not a little soggy. Each sentence that I embrace again soon after I have manifested it, drape themselves like harem concubines on their plush velvet sofas, beckoning me to play with them a little longer, touching them that much firmer, provoking me try different positions perhaps and even spending the night with them. O Kaliope, may I follow behind thy shapely form through the forests of the bewildering. Lead this fragile though portly writer of ill repute away from our nemesis.

The trouble is that muses are fickle, finicky and malicious as they are inspirational and money spinning. Sometimes they strip the remnants of any talent (even its faint echoes) and leave me naked in a crowd of poets. Or perhaps, they whisk away my wings in midflight, as my spirits soar those great wordy heights letting me spin uncontrollably and inevitably to my doom far below. Or they go quiet, leaving me alone to stare at a big white empty screen with the cursor winking mockingly at me as if challenging me to even type a sentence worth re-drafting. Damn you, I sometimes wish I could cry out to it as I do to the heavens during those twilight hours as the sun blazes itself in a quiet fury of orange, pinkish red and streaks of deep dark blue into the dark cold silent night. I'd advise against doing it in the afternoon especially under the tree. Ye gods are known to reply rather swiftly during those times. My fingers ache to roam free on the keyboard but it knows not where to go, so it sits like a Buddha but isn't one for it sits not in reaching towards enlightenment but in waiting for inspiration. Like an old man who wasn't told that the bus does not pass by that bus stop anymore.

In moments like these, these blindingly dark moments of empty voids, these feeble and futile mechanical attempts at creation, I run into a damn. It's not just any damn. There is no flow although there is go but the go is to no. No one that can save you here. No one can hear you scream or write when damned. Your eyes will take on a glassy indifferent texture. Your skin suddenly becomes dry. The potency of your sex drive disappears refusing to erect itself in one of the body's most prized organs. Give up already. It's too late. The grim reapers coming. Soon your flesh will peel and fall off. You will fart embarassingly and uncontrollably with great stench. Your teeth will rot and drop down your throat when you sleep in that cardbox house of yours. You will mispell. You will only get up at night and scrounge for works of good literature but only be able to read the contents of your nocturnal cartons. You will carelessly fling your punctuation marks like a man amok. If you don't have a huge gut with your intestines spilling out, don't worry, you'll get one. And then you will become a Writer of the Damned, rising from the dead to churn out ill suited words to be placed in ill fashioned sentences in magazines so cheap you need to split your five sen coin to be read by nobody except those squishy eyes balls that sit precariously in your skull threatening to spill out. Or worse, end up writing in one of our local mainstream newspapers. Hiss...