Stop and Motion

Some nights you can batter and twat and tinkle the keys and it’s just squat, nothing, nowt doing. It’s just stall after stall after stall after stall. Sputter and crunch of tyres out along the hard shoulder. Climb out. Slam door. Kick gravel away. See the smoke of it lift off and scatter like ashes. Think of this plan of yours as dead, gone, cremated. This hope you once had of being one of the greats, the all-timers, the old-timers, eventually, when your books have all made it past the century mark. A scrap of immortality. A sliver of worth. Hot student bodies in tight sweaters with their breasts leaning over the desk as they search the mass of your text for its myriad meanings. The smiles on their faces when they find the few lines that really, truly, undoubtedly work. The few lines you left behind from nights when there was something doing, when you were just in the groove and shut-out from doubt, and only world left was the world you were writing. Page after page of it. Written, read, edited. Calm in your head as you lay down to sleep. Not stuck by the roadside, pissing into the hedgerow, watering the wildlife, and staring hungrily, angrily up at the stars. Not telling yourself over and over it’s high time you quit. When you simply climbed back inside and let the road take you. When it’s just word after word after word after word, and all of them feel necessary, and useful, and all of them feel good as they make their way out.