Kingdom of the Muse

When I was younger, the Muse would appear in fleeting briefness. She would whisper her sweet syllables in my ear, but would disappear as I tried to wrestle her onto my page. Now the more I write, the Muse appears to me in increased regularity. The more I sacrifice my ink into her altar of diction, the more she comes to me in her crowned verbal glory. This patron saint of the scribe pirouettes on my paper; she sends her divine wisdom coursing through my pen.

She offers me cathartic relief from the thoughts that burden my shoulders. She is therapy for the plague of ideas. Yet she is still so difficult to hold onto. Her angelic splendor is mercurial. The more I try to hold onto her tightly, the more she slips free from my clutches. Her wings fly her off my page and into infinite oblivion.

I stand at the gates, peering into the Muse’s kingdom. Yet her gates remain locked to me. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky stand guard silently as two sentinels at her gates. On the other side, I see Hemingway fishing in a pond of letters. Joyce and his companion Kafka stumble around drunk on lexis and absinthe. Sitting in solitude outside the Muse’s gates, Garcia Marquez sips his glass of choleric ink and waits patiently for his turn to enter.

I offer myself as a humble follower of her divine craft, so that this priestess may open the gates to her printed temple. From high above, the Muse sits as an empress on her high throne of ballpoints, covered in the splendor of robes fashioned by purple quills. With an enigmatic smile on her face, she counsels me to be patient. Her divine secrets are revealed only to those who are ready to bear the weight of inscription. Until that day, this wordsmith is left wrapped in the solitude of blank whites pages.