The Voice

Some days people ask where I get my ideas, how I transcribe what I see into words hopefully filled with beauty or with meaning. Like most writers, I rely upon a muse, an invisible ingenue whose voice whispers seductively within my ear. Some writers describe their muse as shy or flirtatious or capricious. Mine is bi-polar.

On the worst of days she emerges with stress, announcing herself by pounding inside my head as if struggling to be free. She is forced to share the cloister of her confinement with a pair of cellmates, harpies to her faerie. They screech and shriek and wail incessantly, drowning out her dulcet tones with their shrill complaints. Like an evil stepmother and stepsister, they find fault with everything she does. They ridicule her for her differences, her thoughts, her imperfections, her ephemeral wings, the color of her hair. They bite and claw at her, buffeting her with their raven wings. Too often she gives credit their expectations of perfection and the criticisms which scar her. She succumbs to the anger, the frustration, the apathy, the angst, not realizing all these wounds are self-inflicted.

On days when her dissonant rivals fall into a catatonic slumber after one of their exhaustive tauntings, she is transformed into all the things a muse should be. She rises like an island from my subconscious, an ancient goddess, a nymph, a dryad. A golden green willow whose supple, slender branches droop just above the glass ceiling of our world. As her leaves brush the invisible barrier that separates us, the surface ripples with distortions. Sparkling pinpoints flow outward and diffuse. Her trunk is the center of creation. Few scale the heights into which her feet are nestled or climb up onto her damp knees. Or ascend even farther into her graceful, sheltering limbs. Most only see evidence of her existence in the distortions of the night sky they are at a loss to explain. Few know she is firmly rooted in our world, drawing sustenance from our existence, feeding upon our day to day, transforming the energy of our lives into fuel for the leaves which drip and flick the sky with the magic of inspiration deep within the night, sending the stars rippling outward. In the cycle of her life inspiration begets creation which feeds action breeding further inspiration, an alternating pattern like the light and narrow rings within her tree.

She tickles my thoughts as the celestial breeze stirs her leaves across the dark surface of my mind. Her slender fingers play upon the water as if trailing behind a rowboat drifting with the current on a lazy, summer's day. She doses, distracted by the hypnotic patterns she creates while I rush to capture them with only quickly jotted notes and an imperfect, fading memory.

Until the harpies roosting in her crown awake in their eyries from discontented dreams, screaming.

© 2007 Edward P. Morgan III