By Mechelle Gilford
Some mornings
my mind arrives early,
dragging crates of ideas
through the loading dock of dawn,
stacking sentences like bright canned goods
on metal shelves.
Other days
it leaves me staring
at a blinking cursor
like an abandoned factory worker
waiting for the conveyor belt
to remember its purpose.
My brain is not a manager.
It is weather.
It floods the rooms unexpectedly,
fills notebooks at red lights,
whispers entire essays
while I shampoo my hair,
then vanishes
when I finally sit down
with proper lighting
and a reasonable plan.
I have begged it for consistency.
I have offered schedules,
color-coded calendars,
little boxes to check
like treats for a difficult cat.
Still, it wanders.
Sometimes that reluctant genius arrives
wearing slippers and carrying toast crumbs.
Sometimes nothing comes at all
except the hum of fluorescent doubt.
Yet somehow
between the droughts and thunderstorms,
the machinery sputters forward.
A line survives.
A paragraph breathes.
A fragile thing with fingerprints on it
steps into the world.
And maybe that is production too—
not polished efficiency,
not endless output,
but learning how to harvest
what blooms wildly
inside an untamed mind.