The Block

It’s not made of glass or wood or stone. It’s not made of substance, but it might as well be. You can’t touch it, but you can surely feel it. It’s a bondage of the worst kind. It’s a confinement within. And it’s all in your head.
 No one but you can see your dilemma. Likewise, no one but you can solve it. It’s not an exertion of flesh and bone, but of intelligence and imagination. The goal: to escape. To escape yourself.
 You struggle against it. You slam your metaphorical body against its walls. You pound your fists and yell to no one in particular. Within the borders of your mind, you pace. Back and forth. Back and forth. Frustrated and displeased, you wonder, there must be a way out.
 It’s difficult to think outside of the box when your box seems to have dead bolted you inside. No windows. No doors. Only the blank, nondescript walls that surround you. So you search. You seek out a flaw. A crack, a small gap, a fissure, anything really. An Achilles heel that would make your cage come crumbling down.
 You chase each and every thought that passes through with unmatched zeal, like following a string through a maze and hoping it ends at the exit; hoping that one common notion could lead to something spectacular. A light, a glimmer of inspiration comes and you race after it, only to come slamming back into that wall. That insufferable wall.
 There must be wonderful things on the other side of your cerebral prison. Beautiful, fantastical concepts just waiting to be grasped. Imaginings that could catapult you into the plot twist of a lifetime. But that wall. That wall that just won’t budge.
 A wall. A box. A cage. Think of it how you will. Maybe it’s a box one minute and a dungeon the next. Maybe it’s a bubble that has wrapped you inside like an embryo and you just can’t pop it. Its form truly doesn’t matter. It’s all the same. It’s an embodiment screaming out what you need most: a breakthrough.


 “Writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all” – Charles Bukowski, The Last Night of the Earth Poems