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