Writing has betrayed me. And I thought it was my friend. I banked my hopes, fears, dreams and secrets in some words on a page. What a fool. I collected from brainstorms by the bucket, but once captured my thoughts ceased to flow. They died and turned to rot. They stank, stagnated, scummed over, and glowered back at me with distorted, twisted visage, whenever I dared to stir the waters. Now I am left to stare at these wretched puddles I have created, hoping to catch a glimmer of past beauty. But alas, it is forever lost, obscured in the murky ilk of sentence and paragraph, simile and metaphor, analogy and allegory. The entire conglomeration now seems nothing but a cesspool, a mirror, both concave and convex, whose grotesque images cackle at my fears, frown at my dreams, and nark on my secrets. Their sneering faces drive me to dismiss old wisdom as folly, to discard old plans like dirty diapers, and to disown my own masterpieces as a feckless sire disowns his bastard sons. Nothing is sacred. I am forced to lay siege to my own castles, to pull them down from the sky, bash in their gates, topple their towers, and grind their walls to dust...to call them nothing but farce and fable...cardboard silhouettes that burn and helium balloons that burst. And so I am stripped of my work to my shame. Thoughts and emotions I have tried to preserve have fallen victim to the preservative, their very essence lost between the lines of a page. All that remains are vanities, imposter images, posing things that cannot be expressed. And so I suffer on almost silently, my voice drowning in this lifeless ocean of words, garbling my soul message as I gargle definitions. Yet I struggle on like some crazed lunatic, choking and sputtering, determined to leave something, no matter how disfigured, how imperfect.  ¶ 8:18 AM