some mornings are like this

i'm staggering at the limits, a hiker gone too far. there's no water left in my canteen. i'll die of dehydration. i panic and spin in circles hoping to turn my body into a screw and drill down until i hit the water table. but i'm too exhausted to move. i should lie down and let the winds take me or bury me, whichever comes first. some days it feels just like this, how a writer thinks, mind full of pinwheels that are set spinning, spinning, to fire images of morphing colors, morphing words, to transform those things we cannot change into things we create. suddenly, i can't remember where the light came from, only that it caught the edge of one of the fins of this wheel and was beat like egg into meringue, all fluffy and white and wholly estranged from its original form.

i search for an oasis within myself, for a patch of land to start my manuscript, somewhere i can nurture it, feed it, but it seems that wherever i go, the soil turns up dry. i am sun burnt and skinny. i could turn back, turn my back, and find myself in the comforts of the civilized world once again. but some part of me needs this, can't live without it. i open microsoft word. the cursor pumps like my tired fists into desert sand, into the barren and desolate white expanse that is the blank word document. i press one key, then another, knowing that movement gives rise momentum which brings force to push the pinwheels to make them spin, to free my mind into a land of tumbling metaphor. i record it, tenaciously, drinking my own sweat to stay alive.