I've forgotten how to write

I've forgotten how to write. Somewhere along the way I've forgotten how to say, what I mean. Little sticks and thistles, they burrow under your skin like dry wind and the leaves you brush from your faces. And you find yourself there, looking over, looking out, and turn to tell another how you came to this place, this pretty place, and all you find are tangled weeds and hills and where was the path where you left that friend you thought had come with you

I have half a dozen half written posts, if half written means written and my mind keeps telling me to edit to edit to go over once more, unable to let go, unable to let slip a word lest it falls all out and i somehow say what i somehow mean and someone takes offense. Offence. That word of our times, that police baton with which we beat the helpless, refuse to listen to the stories, those stories once heard we proclaim have "set us free" but we leave the authors beaten, unwilling to look at their lives lest we feel too closely the grip of that truncheon in our fist.

Half a dozen half written posts, weeks of thoughts writ out, on programs and mathematics and words and history. Thoughts I cannot set free. They haunt me, they call me beckoning to spill once again that mental blood to pore and pore over them and wring them dry of every drip of humanity so I can hang out the scraps and let others see how terribly clever i am. I never wanted to be clever, never wanted to be seen like that. I only wanted, once, to be free. From the heartache of a harrowing life, from the illusions and false idols, from my own ignorance. And now these thoughts tie me up in clever little knots, and have me writing bad poetry

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