Writer's Block

Ava Bertolotti

I’m tired and wired;

My hands are tied

My neurons are fired;

And I don’t mean firing, I mean burnt

Out. Young-adult reading is an

Escape. From reality; from

News we can’t tell our parents

To shut off, because for some reason

They don’t find music more compelling.

The soundtrack to my dreamworld is

Silence. Never mind; I mean the

Voice in my head, retelling

That story I so want to recreate;

With minor adjustments to the characters,

To make the Herculean more human;

But the plot was perfect. It should be, it’s fate

There’s no room for failure in the imagination.

My dreamworld is perfect. It’s more More’s

Utopia than mine though. Years of happy

endings are running sanitation

Services in my head. Empty bedtime stories

Are fulfilling in their emptiness

They are absurd because they are not.

Adventures across untamed territories

Epics of human greed, boundless ambition

a modus operandi so mechanical, not unlike our own

toy soldiers wound up, marching until their little legs freeze,

but they’re warmed by a comforting blanket fiction

That they’re not those people, populating the cities of lore

Who’re numbers, plot devices; but instead they’re

Sacrificed on the alter of a good story –

Washed of their personhood by war.  

Nauseated, I’m Roquentin 

I scrounge for meaning in stories that

render casualties’ lives irrelevant

I’m set to pull the pin

And explode this corpus of

repetitive fiction half-written; So maybe

the burnt smell of my characters’

paper viscera will corporealize them

remind readers of their humanity,

because I don’t want to look

at those pixel figures on the TV

screen as nameless, faceless casualties

anymore… because after headlines

and projections blur together with

reports of more dying unknowables,

my fiction is just more of the same

stupefying nostalgic dragon-fighting

demon-slaying glory-days frippery for

a student or two to replay in their heads

during class; I am the warlike hero

Who ends the story abruptly and violently, at

some great cost that isn’t – Who was it again?

The sensitive one whose name

we just can’t remember. We call it martyr now.

And sometime later,

I’ll find some bad poetry a-yellowing,

a coarse, imitation-floral grave

cover, instead of the Headstone

For the Story I wanted to write.