Chasing words is best left to wordsmiths

I can always tell when you think I’ve been neglecting you. Your curves become jagged edges, and your stems suddenly seem to stretch to the skies whilst your drops caress the gravel on the ground beneath your feet. Your full stops become aggravated stabs at the page, and then in the next instant there’s not an exclamation mark in sight. Thankfully.

I admit that I dabbled, I strayed, I dallied elsewhere. I played with paper planes and flirted with thoughts of grandeur. A desire for renaissance. But you have a way of putting me in my place, reminding me. So remind me now, in this moment when I need my memory jogged and my conscience pricked.

This is who I am and what I am. This is what I do. It may never pay the angrily reddening bills slapping onto the doormat, and it certainly won’t solve the problems of the world and his wife either near or far - whether they are sighed deep into my ear canal in the dead of night or glimpsed in direct sunlight from further away than my eyes can comfortably see. It won’t smooth the ridges in the carpet or open up exclusive doors. It won’t cause the stars to shoot out of the pitch black velvet to light my path. It will never cure every anxiety, every ill, every fallen wish or unvarnished truth that hides behind these eyes.

I’ll sit on the roof of this burning building then, gazing down at the thin layer of snow that is making a pretence at covering the pavement. I’ll watch the animated dots waving and scurrying, beckoning for me to make my decisive move. But I won’t. I won’t move a muscle. I won’t chase. I’ll do what I always did, and simply concentrate on the task of joining these words together to build a fire escape, a stairway down which I shall make my swift exit into somewhere. Somewhere else. Better. Different.

(Of which I am not one, incidentally.)