Poetic Paragraphs

Words

The words float suspended through the air, lazily dancing from my grasp. I stand in the darkness, push myself onto a chair and reach out, pale fingers grabbing air. There is nothing within my hands, no words to warm my palms and flow through my fingers to make a story.

I need to wrangle these soft-floating syllables into a collection of sentences, grab hold of them and push them into the computer screen so they form characters of flesh and blood. These little black squiggles hold so much power that I can't wield.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong. My fingers are too feeble to find the words. My mind is too weak to use them. Maybe all I can do is fumble through this darkness and hope that this language will no longer run from me because I need it.

I need to make these tiny dust-particle words to form an image, a picture, a moment in time or perhaps a thousand. These tiny words have to collect in the palms of my hands so I can blow them at my my invisible framework-people, their substance giving form to my outlined ideas.

But they run away from my open hands. They're afraid of becoming attached to my story, to my ideas, to my see-through characters. I don't have the adhesive-power of making them mine. They look for someone better to pass through.

And the world is filled with millions of people who are better, who have pretty hands and attractive ideas. Those people only have to reach out for those beautiful words to flock towards their stories.

I have held my hands out for an eternity only to touch air. I know how it feels to be empty. My stories are made of breath alone, leaving my head in the clouds, trying to gather up all the air in the world to keep my characters alive.

I am so tired of searching for words. These stories are taking more of me than I'm willing to give. I can't reach out anymore.

If I close my eyes, I won't see all these words that have ignored me, my framework stories forever unfinished. I need to leave this world behind before it kills me. I'll find a different way to make dreams.

They can't be built by words.