Challenge Yourself

60: What Is Burnout? (Free Verse)

Challenge Yourself
By Fox-Trot-9

60: What Is Burnout?
(Free Verse)

How am I supposed to describe the emptiness I feel
That only writers feel when they have no words left in them to write?

It's like a man scooping up a river with a bucket full of holes
And running up a hill towards his plants
Only to look behind to see a trial of cracked earth in his wake.

Translation: The river is your story,
The water is your string of word,
This bucket is your head full of thoughts,
And the holes are all the distractions and interruptions
Keeping you from writing your thoughts on the page,
For you have no words left to write or say or think.

It's like a fluffy nine-tailed fox chasing after its nine tails,
But it only has one mouth to 'catch' one tail at a time,
While the other eight tail are forever out of reach.

Translation: The nine-tailed fox is the writer,
The tail in its mouth is its current drudgery of a project,
And the eight other tails are other story ideas
Tempting the writer away from writing the work at hand.

It's like pricking your finger with needle after needle
To write on the parchment of your own skin,
Only to find out that you've run out of blood to write,
Because your blood has run out . . .
And your heart can no longer pump out any more.

Translation: The blood is your creativity,
The pricking of your fingers is you turning thoughts into words,
The parchment of your skin is your work in progress,
And your heart is your will power to keep writing.

So my question to you is this: What is burnout?

(To be continued...)

A/N: This is just to vent out my frustrations over not being able to write anything because of all the crazy stuff that's been happening in my life for the past month and a half. As you can see, I'm running on fumes right now.