the journalist's lament

musing is amusing,
punctuated by regular
practices: meals, walks,
more rigorous exercise.
But writing is all momentum
flailing into the unforgiving
changing the destination
by the path I hack,
the streams I follow,
the peaks I glimpse.
All habit becomes a stutter
of impulse and the necessity
to sit in front of it and do it.
The rhythm now is measured backwards
from the infanticide of deadline.
So meals lose their borders,
exercise is only exorcism
and the desk feeds needs
into the motherless maw
of words and their prison:
sentences.