Eulogy Of A Dying Writer

Sometimes you just write just because you have stuff on your chest that you need to let out. That is more or less what I am doing now. In fact I have so much stuff that I don’t even know where to start. I guess I will write the thing that burdens my heart most. Over the last month or so I have been unable to churn out a coherent, or even borderline coherent piece of poetry. My lines seem awkward, all of them. It feels like the words have deserted me and the fact pulls me down so low that even the strongest of soul searchers armed with their strongest charms couldn’t pull me from the depths of this slump I have found myself in.

Maybe it is because I have outlived my purpose in the writing world. I have told my story, I have told all the stories I had in me and now it is just for me to sit and wonder waiting for the day the words will take a stroll down memory lane and find me in the corner where they deserted me and left me to fend for myself while I was yet still a child in the writing world. In the depths of my infancy they left me all alone. So I should just sit here and wait. Struggle at the mercy of this unforgiving cursor that constantly blinks at me so furiously you can almost see it nudging me to a corner, waiting for me to shrivel up and die.

So maybe we should call this the eulogy of a dying writer. The oration of my better dayswhen the words would come out of me with the ease and relief of taking a good piss, frequency as well of course. I remember the glory days when the rhyme, meter time and all didn’t stand over me, looming like beasts waiting to attack.

I imagine myself standing in a courtroom with the gods of writing, Poe, Kipling Gibran and all the rest looking down on me from high up on their pedestals. Telling me to account for what I did, for every single time I used up the visits of the words. Judging me for the times I had that tingling at the bottom of my belly urging me on to write and I ignored it, or mistook it for hunger and proceeded to devour  ridiculous amounts of food only to wonder why  I’m still hungry after 2 kgs of meat.

I imagine myself standing in this courtroom feeling a tad bit overwhelmed by the scene and showing my meager works by way of testimony. Explaining the concept of Birds That Pray or Shades of His Future to Emily Dickinson and watching her shake her head in disapproval. Showing thoughtful Sunday to Rumi and watching him hold his head as if tormented by an unknown evil.

Sometimes I question what purpose writers have in this earth. We come, share our stories, our views, open our hearts and bleed it out in ink and watch it form shapes, then letters, words, sentences, paragraphs and eventually shaping into up into whatever we seem to want to write. Then what? What’s the overriding purpose of this writing thing? It sure as hell can’t be gratification because writing is more like subjecting yourself to an eternal thirst than drinking water. The man that said ignorance is bliss was definitely in his right mind when he said that. The lack of knowledge makes life a great deal less complicated.

So here’s to a dying writer. To the man who has put down his soul in an eternal archive of letters and words. To a man who has spent his life pouring his every thought onto a piece of paper and watched in amazement as the masses used it as a tool to try and decipher the multiple complexities of the fundamentally simple man. Here’s to the words, the lines, stanzas and multiple works of art that passed through him and into the world. Here’s to that man, and though his works have been immortalized may he rest in eternal peace.

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