I’m on my bed, snuggled under an electric blanket, with Leia snoring beside me. I am fighting off or against a cold or sinus infection or just a lot of snot that wants to drain down the back of my throat and make my voice hoarse.

I just wrote a poem about my sleep when I take melatonin. I set it in Wonderland at the Mad Hatter’s table and explored a surreal landscape.

The poem is finished but feels half done. I need to lean into the colors. How they blur and twine and release each other. When I take melatonin, I frequently have strong, narrative dreams in which I am the focus and a bystander.

For the last five or more years, I have barely written poetry. Frankly, I thought I had lost my talent with all of prose writing. When I tried to write poetry, it felt pedestrian. Clunk and clubbed.

Bu then, I started reading a friend’s poem a day challenge. And it’s not a “well if she can do it, then so can I” type thing. I just knew that I wanted to try. I finally felt inspired to break past all of my barriers that I had been building over the years because I didn’t think I was good enough.

Like I didn’t have the right to write poetry for some stupid reason.

And each day, I stretch my arthritic mind, flex the sinew in my talent and sit before the loom and weave. Slide the shuttle back and forth and tap into the words and their meaning and their sounds and their feelings and feel where the poem is leading me.

That is how I wrote poetry. I saw an image or heard a title or felt the lines rise up within me and I surrendered to the mercurial muse who guided me through the labyrinth where no Minotaur exists.

And then it all just stopped. I remember struggling with my non poetry writing. I could feel the words huddled in my belly. But I could t summon them to my fingertips or my larynx. They just waited. And then fell silent. And it was like an essential part of me dehydrated and became dust laden. I’d tap the poetic chamber within me and hear a hollow thrumming.

And then nothing.

I am a writer. I knew that.

But it was hard to think that I was a poet. That past tense verb hurt.

But in the last five days, the poetry muse and I have sat at the fountain and she has been telling me of her adventures. She curls up into her little self, and her wiry legs tucked up under her grimy, tattered pillow case dress. Her matted, bushy hair seems green tinged. But when she turns her head and the sunbeams glance through the cobwebby flyaways, I catch glimpses of leaves. Maybe a twig? Or the thick moss of a chickadee nest.

In the last five days, I have found my way home. Back into a sacred temple deep within me. A vibrant and quiet place of niched paradoxes and untangled knotted puzzles. And I’m home. In my garden. In my cave. On my storyteller’s road. A pen behind my ear. A leather journal in hand. And a silver lighter in my pocket when it’s too dark to see the dim whiteness of my soon to be unblank pages.