WRITING >>> Poetry >>> I Must Write
	Alone I sit, lost in dreaming
			broken patterns of light playing
		over the tormentingly empty page
	I close my eyes and sigh in frustration
	The words are not there for me today
		About to explode from too many thoughts
				pen endlessly hovering
			eyes parched from coffee fumes
	I can't imagine a place I'd rather be
	Or an art I'd rather study
		Existence is awareness
		Awareness is thinking
		Thinking is writing
	In the vast and violent projects
		of images behind closed eyelids
		human kind thinks big and breathes deep
			carving their lives into the very earth
	I see them at their first
	Drawing and languages stretching back in time
		Real people long silent
			but for the voices they drew
	How we know them:
		Pictures on the walls
		Symbols on the scrolls
		Words on the pages
	These words I see, these tomes of others
	These heroes I've given my heart
		These foes I've faced with fear
			These lands I've longed to visit
	These words, these lives
	These people who've lived and fell and fought and felt
		I stand on their tall shoulders
			and
			from them
	Begin to understand myself
	I see their words and so I join them
		my debt the same
	Given the chance to fight for no other reason than to live
			and to tell about it
		I began and so must end
	But this time, if I can help it
		With pages full
	Of songs
		Of sunsets
			Of sadness
				Of laughter
	My voice joins the silence
	and my symbols live on
	these, my carvings on the earth
		What they know of me
		What you know of me
			Is here
			Is all
	So, dried eyes allowing
	I return to the greatest of tasks
	With no choice to be had
	Except that between life and being forgotten
		I must write
	- - Jackie McCarthy, 2005