THE FIRST DRAFT

I can see you labouring at your desk,
giving birth to me, one syllable at a time.
For the love of God!
You cannot help it, can you?
Putting me through the pain of genesis.
You cannot do without,
sketching alive the ruins of your mind.
My first cries still waiting to be heard,
as you scribble me closer with every word.

Narratives slashed across your fingers,
I watch you typing away,
and mourn my fate, as ink blotched edits touch these pages.
This passage through your womb, coercively moulding and shaping.
You exhale only after you have tormented me a little more.
Leaning back upon your chair, satisfied with the changes.
Characters groan at your slant and launch into monologues.
At times their simplicity bores you.
So you pour yourself another cup of coffee,
and the protagonist hallucinates under its effect.
Yes, that definitely makes the dialogue interesting.
But the apparitions then break the fourth wall and haunt you.
Mystified, you take a step back,
as the thin line between fiction and fantasy begins to blur.
Horrified, I watch you about to leave me half undone..

The parched ribbons fade into grey.
Stop I say!
Stop coming back only to cut away more letters,
play with my characters
and leave them heartbroken..
Unable to decide whether to pronounce them dead or alive!
This agony of going back and forth through life, at your mercy..
Who entrusted you with this right?

Your mouth has run dry of word count.
Now you’ll wander off to dingy corners,
and laugh like a deluded drunk at the bar.
Courting stories, you will scale mountains and map the rivers,
the rivers of maddening melancholy,
to create me, who just sits here longing for the final scene.
My hand forever outstretched..
to ask you for one last dance.
Soon you’ll conceive another plot,
waltz around with a new manuscript,
and forget all about me.
The mere thought makes me giddy!
I wonder how many of us are out there,
anthologies carrying around the burden of your legacy.

Royalties await you, and the only thing that I will gather is dust
upon my bending spine.
I wish it could have ended at the epilogue,
but I will be read over and over again..
Forever stuck
in this cycle of birth and rebirth.
Because books never die, authors do.
And we are their only surviving kin,
the philosopher’s stone cursed to immortality..

Picture Credit: Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash