The Block

I’ve never thought of “Writers’ Block” as a place, but as it turns out it exists just north of Blank Page Circle, eventually intersecting a drab little two lane blacktop curiously named Hopeless Boredom Avenue. All of this is encircled within the city limits of Desperation Valley, a place riddled with fidgety inhabitants who exhibit a shared tendency of gnashing teeth and tapping feet as they feign focus beneath a furrowed brow.
Everything on Writers’ Block exists in blue and black lines. The street sign is a thin rod made of the shells of empty pens balanced evenly, cap to point. It’s a street entirely walled in by lead colored bricks and self-disappointment. Plantless due to absence of light, visible due to paradoxical absence of darkness. It is defined by its emptiness, its lack of life, of description. Gutters rim the outer edge with angry steel grates. They overflow with discarded plots and tangy syllables, replacing the nitrogen in the air with pure and concentrated frustration. The soundtrack is a playlist of sharp irritations, crinkling wrappers, scratching pencils, hot, loud exhalations.

The sky above is one great, flat cloud, one-dimensional, just thick enough to white out any stretch of color with condensated malice. Always it is too hot or icy cold. If the ink doesn’t boil, it will freeze into a skinny black cylinder. It’s a place of uninterrupted blandness; the etymology of the word “dull” is easily traced to the the rusted street sign beneath the taut white sky.
Every crawling detail burns the electricity from my nerves and the color from my eyes. I forbid myself from visiting, I think the very name a vile cliche, and yet so often I kneel down beside the jawlike grates and fight to wrench free my ideas, my words, my will to create.