I Do Not Know Why You Write

I do not know why you write:

Maybe nothing satisfies you more than the vision of your words
diving off the tip of your pen to splash onto the paper
with the smooth stroke of your hand where they’ll swim
across the page in time to your synchronized eyes
and then flip over to the next line to repeat the experience
while you congratulate yourself on your wit.

Maybe you like your words to sprint out of the blocks from the starter’s gun,
racing the stopwatch down the stretch to break the tape
at the finish line in a gasp of victory while the also-wrotes fall
to the track in agony over their loss,
or is it because you enjoy testing the stamina of your stories
in a slowly building marathon of images,
hoping they have the strength to maintain their form through the last sentence.

Maybe every word is a twelve round battle between you and the demons
that dance your pen around the ring, jabbing, feinting,
trying to stay off the ropes, as you counter every cliché
until the bell sounds to end the round,

knowing

the fight will last forever and that you’ll never see the left hook
or the roundhouse right that’ll eventually put you down in the middle
of the ring for the final count.

But maybe your words are like the wings Daedalus crafted,
and you are Icarus almost touching the sun when you write.