when the writing stops

when the writing stops ... it is four in the morning and i confess that this poem comes and goes i have moments when everything is clear and then it all slips away into the sudden insecurity that if i write from the innermost pulse of my heart you may not understand what i am saying or worse not care  but you see i long so much for your attention that my aching fingers  freeze like larkspur caught in a sudden frost and i can only watch as the blue inky stains turn to bruised yellowing black after so much tireless scribbling after so many words written then scratched out only to be written again filling every empty recess of a blank page so many words pouring outward from an empty life etched in a repetitious struggle to convince myself that by writing to you or for you my life is not empty at all so many words that somehow shape what i feel  but even as i grasp at this hope the words falter and fail as each line and curve as each stroke and dot becomes fluid and restless and each breaks apart or congeals into unrecognisable smudges the unintelligible testaments of failure that dance off the page until the paper before me is blank again Copyright © Kennedy James, 2015. All rights reserved.