Creativity’s Truancy

 

 

Creativity’s Truancy

My creativity has vanished like smoke,
a truant child who cowers in the back,
head bowed beneath fluorescent hum and glare,
fingers twisting hems, too scared to speak or act.No thunderclap of deadlines cracks the air,
no red-pen fury slashes across the page—
in velvet hush, it wilts like autumn leaves,
colors bleeding slow in a water glass’s cage:
crimson swirls dissolve to ghostly rose,
sapphire threads unravel into gray,
until the water clouds with muted ghosts
and only faint stains linger where they lay.
It sinks now, slow and heavy as despair,
a tall ship swallowed by the midnight sea—
hull crusted thick with jagged barnacles,
sails shredded into green-black seaweed veilsthat sway like mourning hair in silent tides.
The deck is littered with forgotten things:
yellowed pages curling at the edges,
charcoal sketches smeared by salt and time,
half-born melodies trapped in rusted strings
that moan low dirges to the passing brine.
I lean over the rail of waking hours,
staring down through layers of sapphire dark,
where bioluminescent jellyfish drift past
like pale lanterns lost in endless night.
Does it remember still the taste of sun,
the sharp salt sting of spray against its face,
the wild rush of wind that fills the lungs
and sets the heart ablaze with reckless grace?Or has it grown to crave the crushing deep,
the slow, cold kiss of pressure on the ribs,
the patient alchemy of rust and sleep
that turns bright brass to verdigris and grief?
Yet in the hush of three a.m., when stars
are faint pinpricks above the sleeping town,
a bubble rises—slow, deliberate—
carrying a tremor from the sunken crown.
Somewhere in that drowned cathedral of hull
and broken mast, a single lantern sways,
its copper flame trembling but alive,
casting gold flecks on the shifting waves
that promise: rise, rise, rise into the day.