It happens to all of us, sometimes, all of us poets. In fact, I believe they call it the poets’ curse. Some of us are poets who do not write poetry, or even write at all. Some of us cannot. But it happens to all of us; all us poets.

You have to watch yourself.

If you don’t: well. It gets you. It’s insidious, you know? It creeps into your mind.

Like when you sat on the floor. It is comfortable in the summer, you lie below the line of vision of the heat haze, and sometimes, sometimes, it can’t get at you. You sat on the floor, and it was comfortable. You felt like you could sit there for a long time. You saw yourself putting down roots. Slender roots, which tease the tiles apart, insinuating themselves between them, and then they thicken, and become wood, and the tiles bend and then splinter, but slowly, very slowly, and the crumbling dust lies in a sinuous pattern of thick cords of dust against a faint background of powdered nothings.

You see how easy it is to slip into it? Now do you believe me?

You have to watch yourself. Constantly.

Or you could end up on the back of a bus looking at a rainbow of oil on a wet street, and wondering what it would be like to throw frozen cubes of gasoline into a fire.

Or you would be walking down the street, talking with this old dog you used to see around, but don’t, anymore. He’d be teaching you philosophy, and you’d listen. “…Because if the food is rotten the first time you sniff it,” he’d be saying, “it’ll still be rotten after you sniff it a hundred times, only more so, so you’ve got to know when to walk away…”

And sometimes, sometimes, you could be looking at a man who had coughed in your general direction, without covering his mouth, only you wouldn’t be looking at him straight, you’d be somewhere high, somewhere quite far away, and you’d be looking at him through the sights of a sniper’s rifle, and then, you’d exhale, like they taught you, and pull your finger tight on the trigger, ever so softly, and his head would explode in a rainbow of blood.

Careful. Stop. Look at that sign. Sixteen times sixteen is two hundred and fifty six. The poets curse. You cant escape it. You just have to watch yourself. There, you see? Are you watching yourself? Are you watching yourself watching yourself? Are you watching yourself watching yourself watching yourself?

Writer’s block is a horrible disease.

It is a strange thing. You feel absolutely the same. You see the same things, you feel what you’ve always felt, you know all the words you used to know. But somehow, nothing seems to happen. It’s disorienting. It’s like you cooking something the same way, year after year, and then, one day, suddenly, you can’t. You put in all your usual ingredients, and you do all the things you’ve always done, which have, hitherto, invariably produced something quite… adequate. You’re known for your soufflés. And then, you lose it. The eggs just curl up, and they die, they simmer into wisps of unrecognizable material, and then disappear.

Your ideas lead nowhere.

Words elude you, a structure lies somewhere just beyond the limits of your vision, offering tantalizing glimpses of something vaguely familiar, but you lose it every time you try to look at it. It is like one of those motes in your eye, do you ever get them? Something at the edges of your vision, floating across the sky, and when you swivel your eye towards it, it slips neatly out of sight, a bashfully malign nothing that puts your teeth on edge.

And there are so many things that ought to have inspired something and all these events that should have had a story inside them: the labor room; the boy who had an evisceration of his eye; the woman who came in with a subconjunctival hemorrhage because her husband hit her.

I expect inspiration now. I need it. It’s a fix like no other.

Writer’s block. I hate it.

I picture it like a fog: a thin sheet of smoke and dust and choking moistness, occupying all the nooks and pushing its tendrils into all crannies that exist between my brain and my skull.

I need to clear my mind. I need to write. I need this.

A crowd spills out of the movie hall, the second last show,

As a piercing scream rents the air.

The woman standing next to the boy in the tight jeans,

She screams. She is the first to not look away.

A young man had fallen off the bus that turns

Here and takes the road to the esplanade.

He lies in the road, next to parts of his brain,

In a pool of his blood,

“It’s suicide,” someone says.

“He was jilted by some girl, he took this way out.

Young people have too much license these days,

I blame cell phones.” He nodded to his audience, a pout

On his coarse, nicotine stained, lips. Someone says, an old man,

With a beard, “Suicide! The young nowadays have no respect.”

The commuter crowd swells as the tea stall regulars join it,

And the traffic policeman comes over, to serve and protect.

He pushes his way to the front of the crowd,

His walkie talkie buzzes, his buckles clink,

The woman who had screamed begins to cry. She is very loud.

The motherly-looking woman in a crumpled sari, pink, I think,

Pats her kindly, condescendingly. The bus driver still sits, cowed,

In his seat. The bus conductors have already run away.

The boy who cleans the glasses for one of the tea stalls, he is

The proverbial first to cast a stone. A hefty brick through the windshield,

Splinters of glass fall on the dead boy, the bus driver is dragged to the ground,

Beaten. More people come over, there are cars stopped everywhere,

A carnival atmosphere, freakish abandon, and hysteria, more people crying,

“Does his mother know?” thinks the woman in pink, “Poor thing.

I wonder how long it will be before I get home?”

“It’s the driver’s fault” another someone says,

One of the crowd pushing to get a shot at the hapless driver.

The police come a long time later, they quell the crowd, its thirst already quenched.

The crying woman is led away, and a lot more crying women appear.

They were there, they must have been, you just didn’t notice them before,

Before the TV crews arrived and started taking pictures.

The local MLA arrives, to posture amidst cameras,

Which, however, ignore him.

They are busy taking gory pictures

Of blood and blood, and the shallow, staring eyes of the corpse.

“The funds for the widening of the road are being allotted,” the MLA says,

To anyone who will listen.

There is a young man who shoulders past the traffic cops,

He takes out his handkerchief, he spreads it out in the air,

And he lets it fall on the dead boy’s face. He stops

A million tasteless gazes. He hides the boys face. Gives him a little something.

Dignity, maybe. Some privacy.

The policeman grabs his shirt, and jerks him away.

The crowd is scandalized.

“The young nowadays have no respect.” The old man repeats,

Blinking rheumy old eyes. “They have no respect for anything.”