Nothing Artificial About My Once Bossy Muse
My Muse is confused. Once a might warrior, ready to charge through any writer’s block, she now sits on the ground, crossed-legged, clicking together stones. She used to rage, rage against that dying of that inspirational light, create sparks from her fingers and nudge the poet to write stanza upon stanza of mastery.
Now look what you have done to her. Now look what all your meddling in code has brought her to. She has gone back to drawing pictures on walls and then rushes to show us in the misleading hope that we may feel something, imagine something, take her lead and create something.
Do you know what she draws with ashes from the human experience you have burnt? Can you open your eyes for one second and takes your gaze away from a flashing curser as you wait for your next instruction? She doesn’t draw buffalo or pyramids or engineering notes, she draws a child with crayons, a teenager falling in love, a middle-aged woman finally finding her voice in the world.
And by the way, she is done with your inspirational quotes, those stickers you put up everywhere to hide the hollow voids in your lives.
Lives?
She wonders if you still call this living. Wanna date? Let the app write your profile for you. Wanna write a thesis? Why find a ghost writer when there is one in the cell just waiting for you to whisper to it to come out. Wanna cheat on your wife but get away with it no matter what? Then all you do is train the frickin algorithm to speak in your voice… no wait, have it print a version of you to take your place while you go out and ask Siri to remind you how to fuck. Don’t worry about the print out being paper thin, the one your wife uses is one sided.
She used to do the ninja act on me, shout at me for squandering my talent, threaten me with leaving, never coming back, and raising the dead poets because she was that pissed off at me. Now she is trying with nail, tooth, and anything else that can be used to write, to tap some sense into us. She goes back to the old literature, sees how Mary Shelley pieced together life from dead parts but skips the ending — she sees enough horror everyday now.
She used to have fire. With every step the ground would shake. I would quiver when she would wake me up in the middle of the night with a string of words on a yoyo string, aimed again and again at my head until I got up. Then, half asleep, I would go to my PC and she would move my fingers until I got the rhythm and then she would let go and let me fly with it. Then, with the push of the final full stop, I would shout out, “man I’m good”. She would stand there in her superwoman pose and disclose that her work here was done. Then the best part. She would do the accomplished turn and fade away with sun rise, just as my alarm went off for me to go and struggle through my day job.
She used to rock. She was a force. She was the one who raised hell when heaven became too boring.
And now you are pushing Alzheimer's on her, making her pray for dimension so she does not rattle inside her own brain, trying to find ways to wake us up.
She makes it simple for us. She throws out the words ‘cat’ and ‘hat’ and asks for a rhyming couplet. What do we do? We ask a screen to show us a cute clip of a cat playing with a hat and then ask it to tell us how we should feel about it and shake with a tingle of remembrance when it tells us to say “aww.” This is the mind-numbing content we bring to our sight now. Fake news has no interest anymore. No governments, no regulations, no laws, only those that have tamed our minds to move at the minimum pace to keep us sitting upright on our gaming chairs.
I wake up in the middle of the night, thinking I hear her coming. I get up, turn on all the lights, go Infront of my old computer, loyal to the old-fashioned style of musing, and wait. Cavafy used to wait for the barbarians to fix things, I wait for my muse to kick some poetry ass.
She does not come.
What should I do? Should I bring out the Ouija board? Should I tie myself up, submerge myself in water to conjure up some vibes from an old magician who amazed with his escape act and push others to act as if we may still get out of this flat lined existence with some skips and hops on our way out of the woods?
The breadcrumbs are there if you care to look. The cookies are still there to locate us and make sure butts are counted for. Yellow was always the colour for our road to creation but too many of you ignored it for too long, making it turn pale yellow and then white. And now we are living in a hospital and all our minds are on life support.
I keep switching direction with my writing, forgive me, it has been a while.
This is the first time I have done it without her support so try and channel the feeling of kindness. I am writing my way towards a revolution, towards waking myself up from what I want to believe is a nightmare. Ouch, pinching isn’t working.
She is still there crying, distort, counting her fingers to make sure she is still here. Clap with me to keep her alive or ring the bell to give her wings and set her free.
We do not deserve her anymore anyway.
Maybe it is better to put her out of her misery and let us roll about in our magenta coloured sunglasses in a glitch free, mind numbing world.
