Skin

I am impatient to stop getting tired so easily. There are times when I run empty, when fumes are barely enough, when sleep calls like a siren, when the day's chances and choices are vague clouds above the pillow, hardly worth bothering about. These times are too frequent and they are lovely and they be damned to eternal hell.

I am frustrated with the persistence of worry. I am ready to shed the skins of the past before the layers become too thick to bear.

I am a man with too many things to think about, too much to contain. If only it were a problem of sweetness—too much honey for too few jars, too much sunshine for a lazy pontoon, large lots of leftovers… but I speak of a different sort of abundance. I speak of the kind only the walls (gods) understand, troubles whispered against silent ceilings and shouted against road-scratched windshields, notions wrought from iron, hardened not by fire but by the soft redness of the back of the eyelid. I speak of the deafness of caring, the mind railing against a world that spins and spins whether the shout is loud or not.

I speak of shit. I speak of life. There is more than enough to go around.

Sighs and French horns, toy chests and cellos, dinosaur wallpaper and a ten dollar bill, Varnish remover and open floor grates, blue tarp and shredded roofing shingles, neighbors, streetball, big wheels, lightning bug contests, a bike and bricks, an angry dog, a dead one, a missing hamster, a well-meant soul who encircled it all with broken fences. I speak in nouns and riddles because the sentences are not yet ready to be formed. They are there; they form a pool of snakes. They boil below my mind; hissing and spitting, but contained they are and will remain.

Someday a crack will form and the snakes will escape.

I promise.