Disadvantage of being a writer: my mind is never safe from a sudden invasion of words that demand to be tended to. My writing ideas have a worse sense of time than a secret lover whose watch is an hour off. They make themselves known when most inconvenient: the sestina that figures itself out right before I fall asleep; the epiphany of poesy in the middle of a class with a sharp-eyed teacher; the absolute surety of what I want to write, on the condition that there's not a pen in sight. (Someday an entire novel will be born in my head in a matter of minutes at a graveside funeral.) And it isn't just my own frustration over a lack of access to tools: art is alive, and words don't like to have their channel blocked. The physical ache in the fingers, a yearning to write, to type, to grab somebody and scream into their face, purple prose or beige or any words of any color at all, just to make sure they aren't lost forever, because--inevitable inverse predicament--sure as they're in my mind ,as soon as I take a pen in hand the engine stalls. Scaturient turns stagnant; I stare blankly at a page, willing the words to life, but my fingers are flaccid. I see the scenes in my mind, but only in images. A poem lies in pieces on the floor, a jigsaw with ever-shifting shapes. Fully gestated, trapped in my head, but there is no Hephaestus for me, and Calliope is taking her coffee break. So I wait, and write nonsense, little bits that I can throw away, just in case the right words write their way, groping with angry pen and abused keyboard and a hell of a hadeharia and then sometimes they do, one idea, spot on, lancing through the harsh membrane of writer's block and the words come, riverrun on and on, they settle (for now) on the page because there's no other way, the rest of the words still rushing like water through a devastated dam, bursting from every part of the body, rustling around the room, a world of whirling words, landing somewhere, anywhere. Later I'll pick through them and assemble the picture, but for now I can just let them fly. Sooner or later it turns off, either a trickle or a total stop, and I'm left with my larder of logorrhea. I pick up the pieces and putter around the kitchen, cutting and mixing and trimming and finally, finally seeing results. Some things, the longer, more complex pieces, often need more time to cook, more garnish, I put them away for later. Sometimes I cut myself, bleed, and that also goes away: I won't risk serving people too much of myself. But there are other pieces too good not to share,and so I polish, plate, and present. And as I finally finish my writing (or slow down my endless revising), the lexical dust is forming into more ideas, whether or not I have the time to do anything about them. Sometimes i have to push them back,sometimes I just let them take over, and the cycle starts again. Advantage of being a writer: there's never a dull moment in my mind.