High Tensile Fencing

The fear, tension, and anger are too much. I didn’t want to get up today. I should not have had coffee today.

My brain. My brain is buckling. I am balking. Like a pack mule on a trail I am balking, and the cliff’s edge is there. I am balking, stubbornly, but I have the consciousness of the passenger on my back. I feel the terror and the stubbornness. So I am human. Adult human at that, bearing witness to dichotomy. But the anger is quickening between the salted capillaries in my chest. Hardened with bad health. I do not want this. I do not want that. If I had something to say, I would be saved. Some vision to pass on to the world. But it would kill me to make a living by just stringing adjectives together.

Do I have writers block? Is this writers block? I don’t have anything to SAY!!! It makes me miserable. I do not want to bend my talent around pretty sounds. I want to be Billy Holiday, she made pretty sounds that communicated her soul. She lent her depth to the material. She was more than a crooner. More than Conor Oberst’s poet. I don’t want to be that poet either. Dickinson, yes. Plath, yes. A person who’s sensitivities only serve to heighten the pain of their own demise, NO! The joy in pain, I think that is what he fears. I will follow his example, I will fear it, too. It seduces me so. The pain that I stroke like a soft kitten in my chest. I nurture it and relish it, and it makes me ugly. In Jesse, I finally found a good mirror. I look at myself like that, and I see the warts on my face, the pink membranes sagging beneath my eyes. That is why I will follow Conor Oberst’s example and despise that poet, too.

I would have no problem bending characters to my will if I only had a message for them to deliver! Gumby dolls with a soft wire skeleton. I could manipulate, I could create, I could deliver life, if I only had a reason to. And you cannot fake it. You cannot fake a reason. In desperation, I tried. The attempt zapped part of my soul into paralysis. I will not try again. Though I cannot escape the feeling, all ugly and strangled inside of me, I do not want to communicate it with the world. How will I get it out? Like TB, it is. Constricting my chest.