Repeats

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All I’ve got is fragments, 
Accumulated over time spent
Doing too much thinking;
Pithy, useless, little thoughts about 
Bad habits, terrible events, sadness, and well-known injustices,
All simply skewed in a barely new way.
Instead of exploring genesis
And the organic possibilities, 
I’m left with reorganizing the lifeless again.
Everything is clichés retold in different words.
Isn’t that what a writer really is?
A humanities-chemist finding new ways to synthesize old ideas,
Inspiring old reactions to new chemical words added to the mix
All spun and twisted and swirled 
Into different, spectacular creations 
Worthy of being called original
Until you look at the deeper structures
Can you call rearranged atoms new at all?
We are the sum of our parts,
Building blocks of experience 
Stacked on mountains of evolution
Of thoughts and writing and discoveries.
Limited by previous conventions, inventions,
We don’t always have better ways to write 
How we feel other than the time-honored classics;
Over time, all sentiment has been boiled down,
Purified to the salt of the emotion
Ready to rub into any wound
You choose to leave open and show to others.
These are applicable to anything, 
As common as sodium chloride,
Nearly as used, but not as useful.
Recycled, rearranged words are just that, the old converted,
Nothing new is ever said, just said differently;
There are only so many ways to combine thoughts
And sometimes, we don’t have the right words.
We’re running out of time to create something truly new,
To leave our marks on lab tables, notebooks, minds.
We were all something else before,
Part of the dust of the universe,
Spun and twisted and swirled in the galaxies,
And our words are nothing more than just like us,
Inanimate brought to life again, 
Decayed sentiments revived;
We create without the resources to create.
We play at being gods.
Who’s to say we’re not?
 

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