Writer's Block

Poems
- By Scott Nicholson circa 1995
(This is a "Bones From The Vault" feature in which I put some of my old work up for public ridicule on a quarterly basis. Writing about writing. How precious.)

The Writer's Block

The writer's block is a row
of half-shuttered houses lining
a street where the asphalt crumbles like cookies-

a place where metaphors go to die; their skeletons, like those of elephants, are never found

the lights blink on at 3 a.m.
in tiny upstairs rooms
and would-be literati lash the alphabet, making letters
dance in desperation, folded-blind for firing squad

brains crunch and contemplate Plathicide
under bulletin boards where rejection slips are pinned like faint, fluttering moths

at dawn, lidless trash cans spill over with crumpled dreams, cartons from radio dinners, and empty bottles of whatever it was that Hemingway drank

A sheet of paper,
innocent but for the line "the night moved in like a cloak on the shoulders of the city,"
tumbles down the cracked simile sidewalk