A Reason to Not Write

The old gods call to me, chiding,
through the bodies of dead dryads
pulverized by metal grinders,
soaked, sieved, pressed into
consistency and transformed
from the rough coarse bark
and the sweet heartwood,
from the interweaving
of twigs and branches,
from the chaotic joy of life,
into mathematical linearity
of bleached white planes
covered with blue and red
maps prescribing the discipline
and direction of thought,
drilling the letters,
the words, the phrases,
the spaces, the breath
into obsessive rank and file
(my shaky hand making them
slouch like raw recruits
on the white ground ...
unkempt, disshevelled).

The old gods chide me
from the forest, whispering
from the sea, bubbling.
The kraken mourns its
stolen inky avatar,
ripped unborn from its body
pounded, dried, compounded
yet retaining its essence.
See how a drop of the black
soul of the deep sends its
vestigial tentacles into
the fibers of the paper
(is it searching for food
are the minced bodies
of dryads sweet or harsh
with chemical bleach?)
With my pen I inscribe
the dark of the deep
on the reach of the light,
smirching the brilliant page
with the blotted approximations
of speech. The sheet cringes,
not from the ink, but from
the corrosive content.
The words of my song eating
acidly into its pulp and
changing ... mutating
degrading it far more
than the mutilation of
mechanical separation
and symmetricality.

The old gods chide me.
Conspiring, they whisper
in my ear and tickle
the tympanum
with their sly confidence.
"Why," they sussurate,
"Why do you use us three
so callously?" Three?
I think, the wood, the ink
and ...? "Song" they hiss.
The words will live if sung.
But you, tyrant, sentence them
unheard, and merely imagined,
to a silent crypt, a soundless
coffin made of our bodies and
our blood, trapping them in
a senseless limbo alone,
unvoiced, in neat sarcophogi
of lineated pulp nailed shut
with spikes of ink
forever.