Writer’s Strike

something I wrote while refusing to write. I’ll call it a refusal monologue or a courtroom soliloquy—certainly not a journal entry; it knows it’s being watched. 

                           ***

Writer’s Strike

sometimes, stubbornly, I refuse to write. Or she refuses to enter. 
Like a part of me goes on strike and shuts down. 

It feels fatal in some ways. And yes, it’s meant to sound as dramatic as it feels.
Somewhere between a tantrum and a noble exit. A queen needing to lie down because her diamonds are too heavy—picture Princess Diana, promoted to queendom before the crash—and then the crash.

I rest restlessly.

Taking on the duty of God—
Presiding over the room,
With power—manmade, in the same factory as the gown I wear and the gavel I bear.

I, the honorable judge, with the preconditioned versions of me as the jury.
Dissecting the evidence with a trained eye.
Poking the bear in hibernation
With knives sharpened by shame,
Like poetry will somehow just bleed from inflection
And not kill the wild.