At my last job, there was a fridge in the break room covered with those little word magnets known as poetry magnets. During my first couple of months, I’d wander in there most every day, usually late in the afternoon, and construct some little ad hoc one-line poems on the front of the fridge like:

Shadow language is black lake.

Seeing your forest may take years.

Look up: power of sky like symphony.

Recall each day as a life.

Leave in peace, as if about to whisper.

It was fun and it gave me a way to connect with my deeper, truer self and my identity as a writer and a creative person, an identity that was being crushed out of me rapidly by the severe demands of the job. That fridge with the little word magnets was a lifeline for me, a lifeline to myself and to who I really was in an environment that required me to disown myself to survive.

One night, after I’d been on the job seven or eight weeks, I had the following dream:

I walk into the break room at work and see that all of the words I’ve arranged on the fridge, all of my words, are gone. I’m horrified. I’ve lost my words.

Every so often, I have a terse, tight, concise little dream that tells me precisely what I need to know in a completely unambiguous way. This was one of those dreams. I knew exactly what it meant and what it said about what the job was doing to me, and it scared the hell out of me. Twenty years ago, I would’ve walked away immediately from any job that was sufficiently toxic to who I am to provoke a dream like that one. But this wasn’t twenty years ago, and I stayed.

Now the job has ended, as they all do eventually, and I’m still waiting for my lost words to come back to me. The last new poem I wrote (“time is burning me down”) came to me a little over five weeks ago, on the Monday immediately after the job ended. I haven’t written a line, a phrase, not a word of poetry since then. Nada. Zip. Nothing.

I’ve always been at the mercy of forces beyond myself (my conscious self) when it comes to writing poetry. It’s essentially an autonomous process, one that I don’t initiate or control, at least not consciously. Once it begins, I have some choices, but that’s more a matter of facilitation than of willing or deciding something into existence. Conversely, if I try to write a poem, the result is inevitably a disastrous, frustrating waste of time.

Every poem that comes through me feels, at some level, like a matter of life and death, and at some level, it is. It’s a matter of life and death for a very fleeting state of mind, body, heart, soul, word, image, and energy that is trying to coalesce itself into something more permanent. It’s a moment trying to give birth to itself in form, and if it fails to do so, it’s gone forever.

Every poem I write also feels like it might be my last. I never know if there will be another, so when something comes, I give it everything I’ve got. When nothing comes for a while, I begin to wonder if maybe the last poem I wrote really was the last one. Maybe there’s nothing left for me to say. Maybe I’ve said enough. Or maybe I’ve simply run out of ways to say it.

The whole process is a mystery. The only time I ever feel like I understand it at all is when something is coming through me. It’s kind of merciless in that way, to live in the service of something so fickle, so mercurial, and so demanding. Most of the poems I’ve written have come fairly quickly, but that doesn’t account for the amount of time and space I have to make for them to come, and all the time (like now) when nothing comes. It doesn’t account for all of the time alone, waiting waiting waiting, in the dark, in silence, with no assurance of anything, for a feeling, an impression, a surge of life energy to form itself into a previously unheard, unspoken stream of words.

When that stream stops, I am lost. This is the double bind of it all. As demanding and unpredictable as the process is, as much as it takes from me, I need it. I need it even when what comes out of me sounds dark and hopeless. Being able to express my hopelessness gives me hope. Being able to express my darkness generates light.

And now … nothing comes. I’ve lost my words and I don’t know what to do about it. Classic cosmic joke, right? I finally have some time and space, a little oasis between the horrible jobs that drain me and interrupt my creative flow, and nothing comes. I have ideas but they go nowhere. I have feelings but have no words for them. I’ve been burning for months now to write about some very specific things, just waiting for the time and space to do it, but I wind up writing this instead, because this is what comes when nothing comes.

Even writing this post has been insanely difficult. The first version, posted three days ago and removed several hours later, was a half-baked, ill-focused, rambling wreck. It’s not just poetry I’m having trouble writing. It’s everything.

In an audio interview recorded in 2000, the late musician Warren Zevon said, “I can’t write more songs than I get ideas for, so it doesn’t do any good to have better work habits.” It’s true. No matter how much I might want to, I can’t force writing out of myself any more than a farmer can make rain come down on his fields by staring at the sky.

In the same interview, Zevon also said, “But you just keep doing it if you’re a writer. Even if you try not to, you’ll keep doing it.” Also true. I couldn’t stop writing if I wanted to. I just have to wait this out. I’ve gone as long as sixteen years before without writing a poem. Twice. I doubt it’ll be that long this time, but it’s not my call.

Maybe some time spent staring at the sky while waiting for my lost words to return wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all.