Monster, I emancipate you.
The worry, anxiety, noise, the clamoring racket, the never-ending, unceasing abuse of my frantic, tangled mind. The disquiet, the disgust, the eternities, the soiled residue, the lumbering, clodhopping, coldblooded face—fate, mine, and one-eyed blind, the next chapter unwritten, the lies, my sloppy byline. Take your mutant pen in your mangled hand and go.
You may leave, my malevolent ogre. Now.
Others, I do often hear them, monster-free—cheerful, reveling, and unleashed. Let’s go, let’s go, they scream, and they do, jubilant and ebullient, kids at endless recess. There are so many exclamation points, a picket fence off a clean white sheet. So many sharp, punctuating points. Dot, dot, dot, ellipse this, and that, and the rejoicing never ends. I hate you all. And I love you if only to pretend.
Where did they grow up?
Where were they born?
Under what sun, over what moon?
In this new burning season, amid the scorch, smolder, and slag.
I release all of it.
The hiding, ruminating, postulating, eviscerating, emaciating, doubting weakness emanating from eyes, ears, and pores, a polluted river of it, pouring, excoriating, saturating, drowning another inevitable day, afoul. To that, farewell.
I release me.
And asleep, I will be. I will be. I will be.
And awake, I will be. I will be. I will be.
More.
Than a mirage.
As Paul, to Damascus, a road, a moment.