Many days,
Poetry will not coax me out of my stupor
with the zest of a child
on the first day of summer.
Many days,
she will not make a sound
as she runs through a house
made of my words - no anklet tinkling against silvery feet,
no soft swishes of her dupatta across the sofa.
Many days,
Poetry would like to leave me alone
- in my home of rust and rubble,
in the middle of technicolour trouble,
me surrounded by blunt edges
of half-chipped words,
half-baked rhythm (never rhyme), half-sighed syllables onto blank paper.
Many days,
Poetry sees me accept complete defeat,
with art gathering dust
in the pages of notebooks that will never need filling,
with pens that will never be picked up, with ideas that will never be strung into a poem.

And yet here I am.

Picking up frayed string ends,
trying to tie them into a verse,
to leave it on the first shelf for her
to hopefully pick up.

It might be time for Poetry
to take 29 slowstumblingstuttering steps towards me,
this is me taking the first.