The words only come when the world is sleeping
the house is quiet
the birds are roosting
and only the cat prowls
the night.
Then come the words, the dreams,
the stillness in the head
the desire to create
the passion for the pen
and ink
The Midnight Disease
the scribbler hunched over his desk
in robe and nightcap,
The lights low, the shadows heavy,
with whatever scrap of paper he can find
beneath his pen
he scratch-scratch-scratches out some poem
some notes
some mad desperate soliloquy
and when he is done he puts down his pen
and roams the house in nightgown and slippers
flicking his fingers as he labours to catch
that thought
that word
that scene
that he can see inside his head
– almost –
yet it eludes him
In time and with a sigh
he goes to bed
(again)
and does not sleep.
Like the words,
it eludes him.
So he picks up someone else’s words
and slips into
another life.
Today I sat down, as one does, to scratch out some sentence or other I could got keep from my mind, and turned back a page and found something I had worked on some months ago. Unable to work at it until its conclusion I’d let it sleep and forgotten it was there. Finding it again, the end seemed so easy to create.
It is not this one.
This was a couple of pages further back, sitting there all unloved, and quiet. A dull little thing, all grey as night, but nevertheless sweet in its little way.
So here it is. The other later, maybe.
The Midnight Disease is a book about “the drive to write”. Find it here.