Ink-ception

If there was one, just one question I could pose 

To fellow writers mine, each a sorcerer 

Weaving inanimate words into rhapsodical prose, 

I'd ask them the generic, 'Why did you take to the pen, what's your 'ink-ception'?'

For more often than not, 

there are blood-encrusted thorns lurking behind the petals of this particular rose. 

For the day I started writing(all of thirteen), 

I did not care about the atrocious state of my spelling, 

About how crude my metaphors would sound

To readers who had any semblance of taste, 

Or how I'd pathetically inserted the scant 'big words' from my meagre vocabulary 

Into my little poem, scribbled in mind-numbing haste. 

All that mattered was that the scratching of the pen on paper was loud,

A reassurance, a relief, temporary respite

From the banshee screams that I couldn't drown out, try as I might. 

I've written on days good,

 and on nights abysmally bleak

-for rather than a pillowcase drenched with tears, 

my pen seemed to take me closer to what I'd seek.

The longest piece I've written,

Was probably an epistle to someone with whom I was smitten,

Nothing original, groundbreaking; romance usually isn't, 

'Twas just a collection of regurgitated tropes 

That my sixteen-year-old self thought was sure to work. 

Never sent it, for every self-respecting writer has an unrequited love; 

Even the origami aeroplane I'd made with the letter didn't fly too far,

Cupid had the last laugh, on its maiden flight, it collided with a white dove. 

The hardest thing I wrote

Was probably an elegy to my own self.  

Apart from the soul-searing dilemma regarding whom I'd address it to, 

It was a rather unintelligible little document - I'd decided to write it in crosshatch - 

And my teardrops smeared the script, each a large blotchy patch

Like forlorn little archipelagos in an ocean of gloom. 

Ultimately the white skin of my wrist looked too vulnerable, 

the rivulet-like veins too defenceless.

So I wiped the blade clean of the little blood it'd managed to draw, 

And slipped the note into a dusty drawer before the watchful eyes of Mother saw. 

I'm grateful, infinitely so, to words and to my pen, 

To the fact that it's handheld me through terrains rocky, uneven. 

That it's helped me evolve from that little pigtailed girl

Crouching with her notebook in a cupboard, eyes wrought with unspeakable terrors, 

To this expletive-mouthing, ready-with-a-retort 'brat' who often scandalises others. 

Words have been my Achilles heel,

As have been my impenetrable Aegis, 

Words have been my gaoler,

And they've been my liberator alike. 

So mock me, ridicule me, call me every epithet you know, 

"Soft", " sissy little writer", "running off to scribble poems no one shall read", 

But write I shall,

And watch out, for you shall make it to my stories, 

Whether as a hero, knave or punctuation mark, I get to decide.