I like to take myself out.  I like to eat alone.  I like to watch people from a lonely table covered with my pens and notebooks and other paraphernalia of solitude.  I like to be suspended in a bubble in public where I am part and yet not part of things.  I like to eavesdrop on life.  I like to watch reflections evolve in bar mirrors.  I like to watch as people come and go.  I like being the fat fly on the wall.

The noise fills my head and ignites my imagination where everything I love and loathe lives on the same wall.  I am awake to the contradictions.  I am awake to the foreign euphoria.  I am awake to the fear my skin exhausts.  This water is not tears.  This water is not an ocean tide.  This water is not a drowning wave.  This water is not sorrow.  This water is baptism by lake of fire.

I am the ghost under-pinning.  The sharp crystal in the morning frost.  The blade you didn’t know your own tongue to be.  The sword you use to cut your eyes from the truth.  The hands that press the bandages in place and nurse light back into the retina.  Crash and crawl was your language and so I crawled for you until I crashed.