Stagnation, By Brian37 (AKA Brian James Rational Poet on FB/META and @brianrrs37 on Twitter)

I open a new page
Type in a title
By line follows

Keyboard silent
Pause, type, backspace
Pause, type, backspace

Keyboard silent
Tv goes to ad break
Seems like 20 so far

Enough time
To scale Pikes Peak
Keyboard silent

Pause, type, backspace
That artifact hiding
In the wood box

In the National Archives
At the end of Raiders
Indiana has buried it

Keyboard silent
Bathroom break
Must be 5 today

Pause, type backspace
Title needs tweaking
Seems out of place now

Keyboard silent
Topics illusive
In the fog filled forest

It won’t lift
Stubborn stagnation
Is my inspiration dead?

Sylvia, I know
All too well
That stillborn

That taunting keyboard
Elusive muse
The poems refuse

To show themselves
Invisible ink of spies
They refuse to come alive.
(end)

This is about when I get worried if I am going to write another decent poem again. Sometimes I get really scared that I’ve covered so much that I’ll run out of things to say. And when poetry is pretty much the most important thing in my life, it is a really scary place to be, even if brief.

The references in this one are a couple. At the end of Raiders Of The Lost Ark they box the Ark and put it in a giant warehouse where it is implied that it is lost to time. And when I am have writer’s block that is how I feel trying to find something to inspire me and write about. It is an elusive feeling.

And the “Sylvia” reference is about her poem “Stillborn” which is about writers block and stress of trying to care for your poetry like they are babies that die in birth, and never quite come out right.

I have been having this feeling for the past two days now. I have been recycling already printed poems I wrote long ago to try to keep things fresh. This poem is new today though. But it isn’t the first time I have written about this topic.