Dead Scribe

Days were passing to weeks to months while the gaps in thoughts depressed to potholes and expanded like chasms of complacent space filled with dark thrushes like untended weeds. Promises were broken.

The spirit of great thinkers abdicated their seats in his mind. He became a feather in the current–helpless and wayward and gone from the pilgrimage that inspired him by his own doubts. By his own cracks which he, once familiar in their route, now tripped over again and again. He no longer flew–he fell at slow speed. He no longer whistled but sighed when the great clock chimed.

The card was punched. The hour crescent with the newborn night. And another day was lost to wherever lost days went when they were lost. These were times of bloating and nausea, of phantom limbs. His vision, once a window of clarity in a storm, began to take on the wrinkles of ice. At first in the corners, then closer and closer until only narrow, blurry shadows could be seen; phantasmal and still.

He found no portents in the frozen veins. The sleek moisture. And believed his light so suffused by his own distraction and self-pity that it’d never reach him again. Its warmth a memory. This old place abandoned and untended would transmogrify into his prison. This window of ice his crystal ball; a shadow puppet show. These thoughts his last.

Or could have been.

If he did not grip to bloody ends these simple ideas.