Jammed-Up Creativity

Dark genius sits there pondering and staring at the screen.
His features in reflected light glow a sickly green.
He works his cyber screwdriver slightly to the right.
His only tool––the keyboard––is his weapon in this fight
as every blog on WordPress skews slightly all at once.
He’ll show his third grade teacher for calling him a dunce!

He tugs a little here and there, adjusting cyber screws.
And just for fun, he adds a few zeroes to my views.
He knows that I am watching and he senses my excitement.
He chuckles that my false success has been at his incitement.
Then he shuts down the internet––Facebook, WordPress, Twitter.
and my seconds of great happiness turn just as quickly bitter.

Bloggers the world over are turned back onto themselves.
Photos trapped in media files or stacking up on shelves.
No place to reach out for a friend for shut-ins who, once freed
to roam a universe of blogs now sit in dire need
of someone just to talk to. To realize they are there.
They sit staring at their screens, though all of them are bare.

Week after week we wait for our deliverance from this blight.
We miss the internet all day, and even more at night.
I’m thinking about former friends, now lost across the miles,
tripping over poetry surrounding me in piles,
thirsting after comments about every brand new thought.
Having no fast outlet, my brain feels like it’s caught.

Bound up in old creations that have no place to go,
with no easy outlet, the thoughts are coming slow.
Jammed up creativity is worse than constipation,
for writing with no readers is just mental masturbation.
It’s true that I have friends to call and writers’ groups as well.
But they have not the patience to hear all I have to tell.

A blog gives me an avenue to fill out a whole world
with thoughts that for a lifetime, I’ve kept inside, tightly furled.
For those of us who always have felt slightly alone,
the Interweb has seemed a placed created to atone.
In the darkened hours when others are asleep,
we live that midnight life we’ve kept within us, buried deep.

History moves ever onward despite glacier, war or flood.
We see it trailed behind us in footprints etched in blood.
So we’ll survive the cyber war when it comes to pass
by spending more time with our friends, calmly smoking grass
or sharing drinks at Starbucks, devoid of texts or apps,
but we’ll miss our midnight family filling in the gaps.

For SOCS the prompt is Jam