Burnt
A burnt-out writer stares at the cursor
like it is an ambulance that will not turn on its siren.
Every sentence arrives already tired,
dragging its feet through the doorway of the page.
The coffee is cold again.
The sun moved across the entire sky
while one paragraph coughed and fell apart
in the middle of a half-finished line.
Once, the words ran to meet them,
tripping over each other to be chosen.
Now they sit in the corner, arms crossed,
asking what the point is.
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Deadlines blink like smoke alarms
in rooms that already burned down.
Friends say “Just take a break”
as if rest could resurrect
what the fire took with it.
Their notebooks are graveyards
of bright ideas that never made it home.
Margins filled with questions,
arrows pointing at nothing,
whole pages scratched out so hard
the paper thins to ghosts.
They write one sentence,
hate it, delete it,
then mourn the empty space
and hate that too.
Outside, life keeps insisting on itself —
sirens, traffic, a neighbor’s music through the wall —
but inside, everything is dim
like a theater long after the credits end.
The stories still visit in the shower,
on walks, at red lights,
but when they sit down to capture them,
the characters turn their backs,
the dialogue dries up,
and the blank screen pretends
it was never their friend.
So they close the laptop gently,
like a book on a sleeping patient,
and whisper,
“Maybe tomorrow,”
though tomorrow has heard that
too many times
to believe it anymore.
