We drifted away like two party balloons into the bright blue sky.

We are made to feel infinite.  We are made to believe in our own caricature.  We are brought up thinking we can drink the whole sea away, just to look for starfish.  And at night, we rob the moonlight of its beams, of its silverness, and we lay out what we steal in long shining streams in the attic.  Closed shutters so nobody will notice.  People will wonder where the moonlight went, why cars keep crashing into roadways, and some might even wonder what that strange silver glow in the attic means, but alas, you have guarded it too well; you have taken but not received; you have caused people to wonder but you will not tell them why; you have awoken people up only to tell them to go back to sleep; you are the infinite one.

I keep trying to set myself on fire.  Through various means and instances I have held a light, a torch, a bonfire close against my redness to no avail.  I am all damp; I am soaked through with the dizzy smell of gasoline that evaporates as quickly as the rising sun.  I have doused myself over and over, yet self-immolation is beyond my fiery grasp.  There is something that grounds me, a cocktail that keeps me in slumber, a kind old lady that keeps throwing water on my head.

Humans are born to look for safety.  Humans are born to look for the easy way out, to look at the crowd and follow it.  Humans are born to only listen to music they like, to eat sweet foods and avoid the taste of bitter, to wake up in the day and go to sleep at night.  It is unnatural for us to revel in danger, to look at the big wide world and smile.  Inside we tremble at the possibility of choice.  We tremble at the idea of the unknown and all we want to do is jump back under the covers and wait until the sun burns off whatever it was in the night that made us wonder.

The Moment We Might Never Know

It is not often that we wake up and see a bright new moon. Writing is so lonely now it always seems like I’m on the rooftop looking down at a million blinking lights, and even though it is beautiful to look at and describe, one can't help but wonder who turned them on, wonder what it would be like to talk to them.

My skin is stretched oh so tight, tighter than a drum snare, and as it catches the detritus fallout from too many instances, it feels like I’m going to collapse in on myself.

Forever and Always

And even though we are not infinite, we can still dream of it, dream that all the stars fell twinkling from the sky, that when they crashed they made small fires.

I am a dam before the levee breaks.  I am a wave fifty feet from the sandy shore.  I am the last brown leaf in autumn, the penultimate grace-note of a trill, the last routine message before the spaceship is sucked into a wormhole.

It is strange how we have to become unconscious every night.  We have to lay our vast intellectual heads down else we become unhinged, uncorked, unplugged. 

Nothing is so wonderfully depressing as the midnight sun.

Rush

Tremulous.  Like a high pitched E flat, wavering, unsure of its surroundings. 

It has been too long since I have enjoyed a cup of tea.  Enjoyed as if my reality and ream were one and the same.  I am too tired to put on a social coat today; I suck at knitting anyways.  Last night I dreamed of scenarios, disparately related to the same subject, dreams of meeting a person at strange times in my life, dreams of exploding buildings and a million shattered glass pieces glintering light to all corners of my eye, dreams of smelting paper in a cry of guilt and greed, dreams of green paper balloons being mistaken for cyan against the bright blue sky.

glintering, n.

1. The result of drying out the word glistening n;

After Hours

Since when did the fiery crunch of leaves break through the window?

It is snowing inside, with all the ferocity of a blizzard, all the zeal of a religious outcast.  After hours, after the rafters have shook themselves to sleep, after the moon has thrown the blanket of stars around us, after the crickets settle down, after the quiet humming, the fireplace cooling, the almost has-beens have gone sweetly to sleep: there, there is the time we fly, away from this earth, hang time on the windowsill and chum the waters for all sorts of bait.  We want to catch something we couldn’t when everyone could see.  We want to witness the secret rituals that happen when all the typical rest close their eyes.  What grand plans we have at night, grandiose as the cathedrals we try to house them in. 

I wish you could bottle the cold night air, frigid as a matchstick dipped in the Antarctic, so I could open it during an August night and relish December for its rigidity, it’s plainness, the open will to wet the ground with snow.  If only we could bottle ghosts and fire, capture a kite’s wind, and store it on the shelf as an admiration piece.  And then late at night, we would let loose the winds and anguished howls, and finger-paint the sky with whirling supremacy.