Did you know that words on your computer screen are formed by blocking letter shaped light? That pixels are so close they appear to be connected, that they form pictures from your mind to your phone screen? And you thought that you were carving out bits of your heart, searing your soul and seasoning it with pain and ecstasy to that moment of creation before you take a deep breath and click that share button on your screen. You hope your poem would make grown men exult, cry, feel that sucker punch in their gut, that it would shatter commonly held beliefs and create new wrinkles in their perspectives. You hoped they would sigh deeply to read ‘what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed’.

Why is it that we can never share our hesitation, our frustration, and the interminable waiting for poetry to happen to us? Most poets write like life is running out because we are still searching for that perfect poem we were born to write. Two heads, four arms and four legs. Jealous Zeus separated us, split us. And now we are doomed to search for the perfect poem that completes us.

So, you write, and delete, and then write again, retrieve the deleted words and copy paste them in a parallel document which is then relegated to the deranged theme park of your mind. You let those outcast words play there, free of commitment to a feeling which you are trying to make real for the task at hand: write a poem a day using the word prompt given by the blind poetry dominatrix in iridescent blue pleather. Her nails are dipped in moonlight, but her commands are tipped with lava. You go back to those wild words and phrases; you stare into the nothingness; you take longer and longer showers in search of a poem that you must write.

If you are lucky, your poem will manifest itself on a blank page on your device when you are wandering about your apartment avoiding chores, avoiding people, avoiding new routines forced upon you by an invisible virus that has laid siege to us all. You write on the phone, on scraps of paper, on the windows you are cleaning. Run to get your phone that’s charging only to discover that the rains have washed away your poem written on dirt.

You have used up all the notebooks you were hoarding simply because they were too beautiful to be desecrated by banal love poems. Your fingers are green from the ink of a pen you are no longer equipped to use because your fingerprints have been claimed by the keyboard.

You find yourself bound to love and listen to Cohen, read translations of Faiz, and sneak into the minds of online bards, coming back to your window of despair and turning yet another cup of Lapsang Souchong salty. Your love affair with chocolate is all but over and you Konmari everything (except books, they still spark joy). You discover the power of a video mute to work meetings, and when you finally find yourself time, you channelize your inner Lin Manuel Miranda and put that pencil to your brain and write that first refrain as a testament to your pain…

The world is discovering the symptoms now, but poets have felt these long ago. Every time you want to write (and that is all the time) you do not taste anything that is put in front of you. Even tea is just hot water because you are consumed by something else. It needs release, and nine poets of the many who participated in the writing challenge, have penned verses that as Nabokov said that you will feel not in your heart, or your brain, but with your back. That ‘tell-tale tingle between the shoulder blades’ is poetry in this book.

Writing is the job of those who thrive in aloneness. And poetry, like Cecil Day Lewis said is written not to be understood, but to understand. Our rapidly changing boundaries outside have forced us to seek new spaces inside our heads in which we wish to be isolated. We squint our eyes to the skies and watch the stars swirl. We seek asylum at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole. And then we paint with words. Poetry.

Written by Manisha Lakhe. First published in the book, Isolocation: Poems published by Ratio Auream Publishers.