It's like I'm in a dark room attempting to unravel a tangled ball of yarn. This creative blockage, it's gone on long enough - 2 trivial projects to be completed, only 2 in the immediacy - 2 short fucking little projects. Squibs.
The kind of stuff Shelley would barf up in an afternoon just trying to get lucky. Worse even, I mean, my bar is nowhere near that high, (there are disadvantages to this, I'm striving for a planiloquence that doesn't demand too much tongue-twisting or mental agility).
Pull them up on the computer, 1 at a time. Stare at them. Read through them, find the holes, there are holes, lots of holes, childrens rhyming verse, rhymes that fall flat, too complex, don't ring true, don't even rhyme, don't, don't, don't, and the beginning, "In the beginning", fuck, I hate it, how to start, how to start...
Ten thousand little don'ts. But there are occasionally those little gems, short verses, stanzas even, that are perfect, or close enough to, and I'm trying to build around them.
A 32 page project - tops, 1 stanza per page - maybe 6-8 lines on average. And I print it off because I can never grasp the scope just looking at a single page, now 40 pages of printed notes, words, rubbish, ideas, repetitive, the same note made a dozen times, it's fallen by the wayside, or like a hedge grown all thorny and overgrown and I can't find the shape of it...
Or I draw the shape of it, but can't fill in the words, the shape of the verse a cup waiting, I rattle letters, rhymes, jostle them together but nothing seems to fit, it's making me crazy, I've fallen, fallen into very bad habits. It's never been this bad.
Write it all out now, untangling the printed words with pen and paper, sort, make it clear in my head, break to meditate, try and try again, juggle, mix, shake, it's not coming together...go for a walk, pace, pace, this, these projects, they've made me a neurotic, restive, infected me with a hundred nervous tics, this - and this is the worst - is I know it is a simple thing, it should be struck from my pen like a grocery list or a scratchy-Bill-Paid, somewhere in my head my little genii's playing "hide and seek", and I'm going a bit crazy trying to find him...
Time for a break. I'm gonna try and sell off some more shit on Kijiji.