Quill Aquiver

Oh dear Poe and Dickinson, I don’t know how you did it.

source

Work-From-Home

I am going crazy
sitting inside this house.
They call it freelance
but I call it shut-in,
this endless typing of nonsense
onto a dead screen like it’s a friend
because it’s the only thing I’ve got
to talk to,
all day,
all the time.
I will tell you my stories,
dear static of electrons and gigabytes.
I will tell you all these things
inside my head,
poured endlessly
into the wasteland of a blank word document.
That’s all you are, after all –
a parched desert that we try to fill
with the thirst of our souls for someone else,
anyone else.
And so we write stories.
The only breathing
is the rustle of the blinds in a breeze
because I left the window open again,
a forgetful reminder that there’s a world outside.
But I can’t write out there.
Too much glare across the screen
and my fingers lost the quickness of pen
in favor of jabbing at keys in frustration.
Quick, spiteful precise stabs,
anything to flood my message across that empty line.
Lines and lines and lines,
meaningless lines we try to make say something
about our loneliness
but not about our loneliness,
about something else that would be greater
than just telling the world the story
of sitting for the slow-drip torture of seconds
as our life wastes away
down the drain,
a straight shot from the faucet
because all we have are the too-hard chairs
that become our companions
and remind us constantly of the discomfort we sit with.
There’s too much bitterness on my tongue
for me to keep drinking coffee.
We try to say something other
than the sounds of a silent house and road work outside,
because that’s not a good enough story
for a mind crazed by sitting endlessly on the inside,
calling it freelance
but dying from shut-in.

Tags: alone, bitter, computer, crazy, free verse, freeform, freelance, freeverse, laptops, loneliness, lonely, poem, poetry, screen, shut in, trapped, work from home