The Greed of Words

Poems sinking their claws deep into my throat,

words suckling greedily from my parched, dry lips,

novels burning rotten inside each and every tooth,

the echoes of stories pounding relentlessly

within the rhythm of my heartbeat.

A never-ending stream, nay torrent

of thoughts and dreams and desires and nightmares,

scratching desperately at the insides of my skull.

Galaxies clamouring in the space behind my eyes,

cruel, tantalising realities whispering across my vision,

creation bursting from my bloody veins,

unsung stories weighing heavy on my tongue.

My fingers restless and broken with the fervor of all these pent-up worlds,

just itching to come to life upon these brittle pages.

Nagging, nagging, relentless

the flashes of speech and fights and loves and losses,

thousands of people locked in the inbetween spaces of me-

the joints, the veins, the hollow bits-

begging for release into new homes,

homes where people are crafted ink with conflicts born of lead.

Freedom, my stories crave,

freedom into the thoughts and dreams of thousands more than I,

room to evolve and change and become more,

more than the suffocating confines of my brain can allow,

before they are lost forever in this sea of infinite, untouched potential.

Words, the writhing parasite infested in every writer’s skin,

we made unable to live without that gluttonous greedy worm.

My tendons, hair, lungs, wrists;

nothing but conduits for the festering leech

now as much a part of me as my aching muscles and nerves.

Each breath I release the agony of dozens of stories waiting to be told,

to be immortalised in the minds of generations to come,

as well as thousands more that will never be graced

with that sweet taste of eternity.