The muses aren't calling and I am desperately falling into the abyssmal dark...

Okay, what do you write about when your life is filled with so many banal everyday necessities that you, a person who has never had any problem with spelling, look at words on paper which was once your entire love affair with life and all you can do is think "I am becoming dyslexic." ???

Words used to simply flow to me when I called upon them. I was a priestess with sourceful abilities. My fingertips were magic mediums. My soul was a magnet for commanding language.

Now I am an empty vessel, with no stories to tell except how I fell asleep last night on the couch, with my jacket and clothes still on, freezing cold because the heater is recently broken, with a small throw wrapped tightly around my feet, and my head wresting on the pages of a great green lump of a shakespeare anthology. How I told myself I would close my eyes just for a second, and woke up at 3:30 am to Issac's cries from the bedroom and stumbled in to change his diaper and pajamas which had pee on them, and then fell asleep next to him but only after I had turned on the bathroom faucet to prevent the pipes from freezing because I had no idea how cold it might be outside. And how the faucet made weird noises all night that kept me in a restless state of sleep, dream-worrying about grammar and shakespeare and past participles and gerunds and indirect objects and heating bills and gigantic god-ordered floods designed to destroy those who are not pure. Lucky, my old cat-friend, curled up next to my feet and purred in rythm with my distressed sleep. I'm glad to have him back.

Laundry

no hot water in this house
we'll take what we can get
rub away the rust
and try to make it fit
wash it without soap
at least now it feels clean
"turn the pants wrongside out
so you can see the seams"
in the Shady Woods it took
all day for clothes to dry
when I was five years old and
the line was six feet high
today I have a dryer
makes a lot of noise
it keeps me warm in the winter, though--
God bless me and my boys.