The way

I watched the way he wrote
with his hands on the table
initially erect, elevating his head
because he had a good idea
and excitement pulsed through his fingers.

A blank page, flat and hopelessly empty
seemed grand and full of possibilities.
But to take such a task
and to put it lightly--to say it is easy--
This was a horrible, irreparable mistake.

As he wrote on, he realized on
that what he ejected
and what he scratched
and what he wrote was just
not good enough.

And his back began to break--
a slouch so strange
so seemingly curved
like the curl of cats startled back--
it was a hard to watch
as the man I loved
the writer
began to die.

And so swiftly did my love.
For as his back curled, and
his head inched closer and closer,
almost kissing the scibbles on the page
on the desk
and as his hands dug into the wood surface
and his pen seemed to scrape instead of
flow
I could not see the writer.

He was becoming a part of the desk.
Some sorrowful nights
when I would turn up the lights
I would wait a while against the door frame,
eager to be there if he should rise,
But he stayed there where he was,
still hunched over
still writing away
still stuck on the same sentence
he had been on for five years:

Once upon a time,

But his 

The Rejection

The big R-E-J

Nice fat blank
where your name should be

A personalpublic humiliation
contemplating the reactions of people who may have known you applied and for some God-damn reason remember that you did, and wish to offer a congratulatory smile or a "you'll get'em next time pal" reply

You don't want a pity smile
which from behind those lips block the words:
I kinda knew you wouldn't get in.

Infuriated and calm
it's all the same
and the promise of time will allow the self embarrassment to subside

Pathetic at best
You deal out the alternatives and
realize that you have much more important things to do anyway.

The fact

The fact is, I love what I do, and I will keep doing it till the day I die.

The fiction

Once upon a time.  Once upon a time?  Why only once? Cinderella wondered.  Was her story meant only to be told once?  If you shut the book and put it back onto the shelf, does the story just stop?  Mid sentence, as little Miss Cindy was just about to slip her foot into that dainty glass heel?  Can it not continue? Move forward?  Surely, a closed book does not entrap her in the moment, foot forever floating mid air above her destiny?

What Cinderella didn't understand was that each page was stuck forever in story-time limbo.  She was on page 57.  Cinderella on page 58 is the girl who realizes her dreams have even the slightest possibility of coming true, and Cindy on page 107--the final page--gets to live infinitely in love on her wedding day with prince charming.

She doesn't understand that once that ink is stamped and dried, her fate is sealed into the page.  She never will reach her happily ever after. 

But she doesn't realize this and that's the way it will stay.