Creatures of imagination we humans all are. The far away stare, the glazed-over expression, the distance in your eyes when you’ve left earth behind and plunged into the vast worlds of your imagination. I can spot the look a mile away, when someone ceases to see the physical world before them, and allows their eyes to switch into the realm of their mind, the playground of their imagination.

The creative creatures among us will know the pain I speak of when there is something blocking that gateway, be it writers block, emotional stress, the busyness of life – sometimes it just happens, and when it does you feel so bound to reality that it becomes hard to breathe. This poem was written in the height of one of those moments for me a few years ago, written in an attempt to break free.

The death of my imagination. JR Manawa.

Sitting here, feeling the quiet darkness of death.
The rat in her cage. Abused and disused.
Quietly suffocated. Snuffed out of existence.
Her candle burns too dimly now, as her mind
Shuts down. Imagination, settling into the dust
Of the thousands gone before her. Irretrievable.
It is gone. Flown on paper thin wings, carried by
The dead breeze. Dragging itself to a grave where
She will not find it. It is gone. The love affair.
The romance with the unseen is dead.
And still she sits. A rat in a cage. Imagination gone.
Freedom beyond the horizon. Sitting here.
Searching instead through the dust at her feet.
Come back to me now. Please. I cannot live without
You.

Written by JR Manawa