Fishing For Words Poem by C Richard Miles

And when you think
That you have at last, passed the last lap
Tapped into fast chat, got down to brass tacks
Grasped facts, amassed your text, know what to say next
Cast your net and fished fine phrases unfazed
Which blaze and amaze and play to the gallery
Out of the ocean of oratory, that emotional laboratory
Notional commentary of self-promotional erudition
Suddenly, as you’re fishing, the inhibitions kick in,
Indecision slips in, imprecision knits in
With your quick-fix slick tricks, that rich mix of
Superb verbs, spurred by verve, unswervingly
Turned to slurred words, an absurd dirge, turgid verse
As you lose nerve, stagnate, stutter and laugh
As each gaping gutteral paragragh, once as vast
As the gap between a herringboat’s otterboards, that opened up
Forming and spawning yawning mouthfuls of bait
That couldn’t wait to lie in wait to lure the reader in,
Slams shut, amps cut, in an all-but utterly silent embarrassment.
As your boat-load of prose, buoyed by full stops
To sail your sentient, near-endless elegant sentiment,
In once-intelligent sentences, dense with sense,
Is rendered in unintelligible senselessness.
Kept barely afloat by bobbing hosts of commas,
Buffeted by storms of syntax, all numb-thumbed undone
In incomprehensibility. You lose your ability for sincerity
As tenses lose sense, your muse is wrenched,
Elocution becomes a nuisance as each knot unloosens
That tied word to word inside your imagination
Differentiation is blurred, enunciation slurred
As well-wrought blurb plunges plangently
Inelegantly tangentially to gruff gobbledygook and guff.
Enough, you rail, enough. Shut up. You’re stuck.
Don’t mock or try to shock. It’s writer’s block.