Words, words, words
A Meditation on Creativity in Free Verse
Words, words, words everywhere!
Discombobulating the mind
The murmurations of choices, teetering
Through a house of endless mirrors
Each reflecting back, a singular thought —
“Write, Write, Write!”
A hunger grips the soul, a restlessness
To consume it all. Everything, all at once
FOMO rears its ugly snout, sniffing
Fearfully, for the smell of inspiration
The new mind hijacked by the tainted fix
Of meaningless pleasure
In mere flashes of clairvoyance, flickering
Aimlessly, like images in a photo booth
The addiction of the momentary
Joy strung together like rosary beads
Constantly thumbing up and up and up
Searching for that next high god
Shallow delight molds a shaky mantle
Vast over voids of the emptiness dark
Devoid of matter to plumb the depths
To seek veins of richness and meaning
Vast ceilings over cavernous silence
Pockets filled with noxious ignorance
Waiting to be tapped, a reservoir that
Will gush inwards, if only we allow it
Trapped in a nervous disquietude, we
Wither our neurons away in insomnia
Wasting years of precious life, stoned
In this waste land of hyper modernity
Book creases wait patiently to bend
To waft that pulpy whiff of cellulose
The charcoaled thoughts arranged
In anticipation, of the feeding mind
To eat the words of the world, gorging
Every morsel of wit and understanding
Of passion and the suffering of illusions
Of those who have gone before, greedily
Yet drowning in a wash of endorphins
All of creation in a tantalizing grasp
Masked, unrevealed in the fog of now
Writhe in suffering for a moment’s gain
Rising once again into the crowded now
Lost in the multitude of this hungry world
I lay my head down for only a moment
And close my eyes to the waking dream …
I dream of a bookshop at the end of time
Of solitude at the end of the world, waves
Engulfing my soul in a torrent of words
Smothering my end in a warm embrace
And the words fall silent in the quietness
And the sea and the winds is all there is
© Unni Nambiar (June 13th 2021)
