Scheherezade stole all my words

I am a bad storyteller. No plot, poor character development -- no motivation -- and really bad dialogue. I am also horrible with transitions. Endings are even worse. And while watching tonight's production of The Arabian Nights at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, I realized I have no clue about suspense and The Cliffhanger.

And as I sat entranced by the unfolding narratives, I started thinking about the poems that were (not) sitting in my apartment, on my bookshelves, in my notebooks, (not) on those pages. Why can't I get them written accurately? What words escape me still, preventing me from finishing these poems, this manuscript? In one of Scheherezade's tales, Sympathy the Learned says words are the destruction of worlds. They can be -- both by their presence and their absence, both by their utterance and their silence.

And isn't that what Scheherezade the storyteller was doing? She was building a world -- many worlds -- out of imagination, out of words that she uttered and out of words that she did not. Indeed, the queen of cliffhangers is really Scheherezade. For each tale that she told, there was a cliffhanger that saved her life and that of her sister's. So perhaps each cliffhanger is like the end of a verse in a poem? The space where she stops at dawn like the empty whiteness at the end of a line pulling you farther until you wrap into the next line of the verse, until the next dawn?

She is the poet, the trickster, the storyteller, the writer, the playwright, the puppeteer weaving story within story within story -- until you forget which story frame you're in, until you're completely sucked into the tale, you've become the character -- you, you are the Sheik, or Sympathy the Learned, or even the Madman. Transformations happen before your very eyes as one character melds into another, as one scene dissolves into another and another then yet another...

My mind is still reeling with images from the stage. The sounds, the colors, the music. Oh, the music was beautiful, melancholy, happy, funny, poignant. I was blown away by the entire play -- the actors, the script, the scenery, everything. But nothing I say suffices. Maybe all the words were used by Scheherezade when she told her stories...

I jump into the car and I shout to my brother, "This was the most amazing thing ever!" and he simply nods. "Cool." How unoriginal: "amazing," "cool". Are those the only words in our vocabulary? There are thousands of translations of these tales, and I am struck dumb by this translation, this rendering, and all I have left is "amazing."

That's why I can't write these poems. That's why these tales were told by someone else. I'm simply without words. Simply without.