“I’ve got nothing” he whispered to himself as he sat at his desk and stared at his computer screen, evidently blocked. He wanted to write something unrelated to politics, some sort of poem, but not about her. He wondered why when it came to romantic poetry, with all of his adventures and misadventures, it was her image that always crept back into his thoughts.

Frequently, when he felt blocked, he merely found a single word and then expounded on it. But today, not even that worked. The words that came to mind were just too bland.

It’s not as though he hadn’t written at all. He was fairly disciplined in that respect and when he’d woken, he’d scanned news from all over the world (both mainstream and alternative) and written a quick article (“The Hypocrites’ Ball”) which he had dutifully published over several different media sources. But for some reason, today, that just didn’t seem enough.

He thought about writing a short essay on the incongruity of “comas”. How our cognitive segmentation did not quite match grammatical segmentation with respect to their use so that we almost always used way too many when we wrote. But …. Not today.

“Hijuele puta!!!!” he exclaimed under his breath, exasperated.

“Damn her”!!! ….

“Damn her again.”
_______

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2017; all rights reserved. Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia although he has primarily lived in the United States of America (of which he is a citizen). Until recently he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). He can be contacted at wacalvo3@autonoma.edu.co or guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at http://www.guillermocalvo.com.