My trusted words betray me

They’ve turned fickle and finicky,

Slippery to my grasp;

I reach for them to stand them in their proper place

But they slide from my hands like elusive lizards,

Leaving me stupidly holding the tail in my hands.

They refuse to stand still, climbing all over the page

Jumping like those quintuplet monkeys on the bed

Mocking me, laughing at my efforts to pin them into thoughts

Climbing out the window, taking any scrap of created thought with them.

I fight with them, wrestle with them,

Cajole, whisper, and shout.

But it all ends in a mess, and I find myself standing confused and distracted, words in chaotic heaps all over the room, furniture overturned in the madcap chase for the right verb, while the proper nouns huddle crying and hurt in the corner, the adverbs swing by their tails from the chandelier, and the adjectives string themselves out across the floor like spaghetti on steroids. And it is right, for how can words say what you want to say when your heart does not even understand what it wants to say?