Menial Ordeals

I’ve smelt it in the air,

I’ve seen it in the passing cars,

the mindless pigeons and the shapeless clouds in the sky

I have been looking for that originality.

It’s there, I’m sure of it. I see it show itself sometimes,

sticking out a tongue, poking round its head, lurking in the shadows.

It’s hidden in the depths of my brain, at the tip of my tongue, in the steady stream of ink that my pen exhausts gripped by my frustrated fingers with fruitless fervour.

I grew up with words, the kind of words that make you want to string together to form pretty bracelets that you can show off to your friends,

that sparkles iridescent when it catches the glare of sunlight and that mean beyond its simple letters.

I swallowed quotes and punch lines, adages and idioms in foreign languages. But what could I make of it all? I could only sit in front of a computer screen and try in vain to form a sentence, a paragraph, an essay for an English class.

Ideas float around like dandelion seeds that I couldn’t catch because the wind only and always carries it off to plant in some other lucky fellow’s head.

Like bubbles, sentences pop too quickly, are too delicate to hold and to be inspected further.

When everyday of your life passes the same way

You lose the excitement

Missing social cues

Missing deadlines

Missing the bus

Missing...home

You look towards the end of the river, over that mountain

And into your computer screen…

When will it ever end?

How did it begin?