Your characters
are carefully crafted,
your plot lines
well thought out,
and each night before bed
you scribble a bit more
of the story down
and each night,
you turn pages
and think,
“I didn’t write this.”

And now the characters
are running amok,
and the plot twists and turns
its way into dead end alleys
you never dreamed of.

You sit and stare,
scratching your head,
then begin scrubbing
and erasing
and rewriting
long into the night,
until you finally
get your fictional little world
back the way it should be.

This goes on,
day after day,
until one night you discover
a new character
is banging the protagonist’s girlfriend,
a sweet midwestern angel,
and she’s howling
like a **** star,
her ankles behind her head.

“She would never!”
You scream.
“That is completely
out of character!”

You erase furiously
like a man possessed,
then say **** it
and tear out pages
until you are certain
you have rid yourself
of this nonsense.

You drink whiskey
from the bottle,
and with each sip,
the pages burn
and cast flickering
shadows on the wall.
You finally sleep.

In the morning,
with an aching head
and blurry vision,
you open your book,
and find those pages
have regrown,
like shiny white leaves
printed with the blackest ink.

You sigh,
pick up your pen,
and ponder
what happens next.