Long nights slip by with only a weak, lifeless pen poised above the blank page.

For hours, the tired utensil fills out required pages like a zombie. Unwilling but obeying, it bleeds onto the white space and fills in the many required blanks.

When time becomes personal, there is no time at all. The ticking clock has already gone too far.

No time to write tonight.

Another day of bustling people and jostling memories among pages demanding to be treated with urgency.

Numbers take up my patience while my mind threatens to float away to a blank page sitting at home. My calculator hiccups out the wrong answer as a teacher shakes her head. My head rings with an uproar of noise and I am sent spinning through the rest of the day.

Setting down another tired pen, drooling out the last pools of ink, it dies.

The blank page still lies untouched.

No time, another day, less time.

There lays the blank page.

Not even an artist’s brush could mark it for; the brush would dry up before even gracing the page that sits alone.

More work and ungrateful papers…

I look across the room, late one night.

The lonely page has long fallen away onto the floor.

Broken and without purpose, it lays alone.

Contemplating the guided words in my hands, I twist the controlling page into a worm of ink and crumbs of paper.

Throwing away the day’s duties, I toss aside the controlling deadlines and demands.

Falling to my knees, momentarily free of the shackles I reach for the blank page and with a trembling pencil of determination I envelop myself in the endless whiteness and growing possibilities.

Words, only pure words from my own mind scratch from the sharpened tip to the virgin page.

Free, I spill my thoughts over it as life fills my living tool.