To ease his ever restless nerves a neurotic writer sits at his notebook
He looks to past works with dissatisfaction.
a grip tightens on his chest while he looks for new ideas and new feelings,
something to build on, some world to escape to.
Thrashing a pen with intense strokes
the poet seeks to create something of substance.
He sees a full inkwell as nothing but a bottle to hold his liquid vitriol.
Despite his desperate attempts to deplete it every thought is struck down, the looming threat of inadequate craft has a sinister smile, and a taunting flair of instigation in its voice.
No longer accomplishments, the poems on previous pages spring up and hold down the old and helpless writer and before he can get a chance to close his book,
the words etch a brand onto the man with his untapped reserves of ink.
What they write is a label, one that designates him as not being of high enough quality to express his creativity with any degree of fluency.
The old man’s shoulder aches from his new tattoo.
With the same ink he dogmatically hated, a phrase had been printed on his back.
It reads “Further and further this old fool spirals, and despite all his fits, he is yet to even judge himself”.