Right /Rite/ (Write)

I cannot make heads or tails of it. So many days without a breath of fresh air. Days of sunshine come and go, I do not notice them, I pull down the blinds. Twenty-four hours of darkness, it wouldn't work without it. I eat, I forget to eat, I make coffee and realize it's evening, I turn off my phone, try to turn off every connection to the outside. Startled when the mail drops through the slot and thuds on the floor.

Is it supposed to be like this? For every hour of productive writing, there is one of procrastination and another of agony. I wander the apartment, tear at my hair, read other people's words and love them, want them to be mine. Look at my own and my gut turns. Is this all I've got? Did you think something would become of this? I lose my breath, can't be bothered to regain it. Opened up the wrappings of this heart, to try to find the letters that trickle out of feelings, only to find piles of pain and no words worth retelling.

Difficult to calculate worth. So much pain, for so few ounces of printed page. So much blood, for such pale ink. I wish I could tell you now, that when the moment of clarity at last came, when there appeared in the rubbish just a sliver of poetry after all, that it was worth it. I don't know that it was yet.

But I don't know any other way to live, either.