My ink stained hands, pure white with smudged black puddles covering the fingertips, are the finest poetry I have ever beheld. They tell of far away mountains, impossible romances, the racing of the heart as it is exposed to the most beautiful work of art. They are witness to those many late hours spent dreaming, writing, creating, and being inspired as I inhale the intoxicating perfume of the ink. They caress the paper in imitation of the paintbrush that tenderly kisses the canvas before it. These black, dirty fingers glow in my eyes like the darkest obsidian, hinting to unexplored depths in its impenetrable darkness – to eternity.

I see midnight skies, the mysteries of their unattainable spheres bewitching me as I hold my breath. I see passion – brilliant, maddening, beautiful – in the intimate way the quill rests between my fingers, everything covered in ink.

There is beauty in that stain left behind by the completion of a beautiful verse, and there is poetry in the blemish covering my index finger like the most faultless rhyme. There is enchantment in the way the ink smoothly flows out, seductively posing on the lines of the paper. The very wind races, spurred on by the magic.

Its very blackness is the sunlight at dawn, rising to illuminate the world. It is the happiness that suffuses the heart, making life worth living. What drug can be so presumptuous as to claim to be more entrancing than the art of the writer or more exhilarating than the fragrance of that ink, set on paper in elaborate swirls and smeared all over my fingers in shapeless blotches? This is the immortality we so desperately seek and the bewitchment we have been dreaming of unraveling and possessing.