I am a sour bitch with a pen like a knife like a wound and I want to feel and hurt and learn.

Words burst and fade and I chase them, cutting and killing. It was an accident. I sliced some vital thing into little ribbons that soaked into a greedy earth.

Daydreams are so clear, but when I look for timid things that crept through my head on the way to work, they are already dead.

Walking across the cracked pavement with a fat lip and low hopes Friday, I went to work repeating the stuff in my head. Waiting for the page were words like kids with scissors. I had just a few seconds before everything was wrecked by time and the glum routine of following my feet upstairs.

Writing is not the right words in the right order. Anyone can shuffle magnetic letters on the refrigerator, or swallow a P, like a friend had said his baby did. They were taking x-rays and things, looking for it. Writing is a lump of clay with a few of my fingerprints already beginning to shape it. Just one poke into the soft stuff and I am obligated. If I don't shape this thing right it's gonna sag and fall apart. It's gonna be confusing. I need a precise thought. I need symmetry, beauty, and a reader.

Waking full of shortcomings, I looked down as my feet dangled. Everything felt impossibly huge. I was a little kid again and I could not see over the steering wheel toward life, running naked and stupid, but never getting out of the way. Until my feet touched the floor I had no idea that not everything was possible, and not everyday was happy.

Somewhere between little kid and middle school kid, when I realized while trapped on the bus that I had forgotten to do the math homework, the little spurts of emotion that made up my carefree mood had rotted. Ants crawling over green fuzz. It was dead. Next to it was happy. Happy had a hole in its head, and fun was also skewered by age. At 14 it just had no place in a world where homework, or not, meant the difference between falling asleep and staring at shadows all night as stress whispered to me.

I started falling asleep in school. No one poked me or cleared their throat or wrote a note to my mother. Either no one cared or no one found it interesting, but I doubt they were not looking.

Before I reached middle school I was already crying that I did not want to go to school. I couldn't sleep and I would be tired and I would stress, cry, fling the covers aside and burst across the hall in my bubble-gum pink nightgown and wake my parents. I CAN'T SLEEP…

I stay up much too late now chasing thought across the keyboard, trying to pick the weight of words off my shoulders. As I drive to work, the words start. Often at night, they're burned and gone and I stare inward, waiting.

Today's crocuses wrapped their arms over their heads as an overcast sky pressed down. Just days ago they flung their petals wide beneath sunshine.

Lily and I have been on the street, alternately lunging and not lunging at cars. We run through the woods with Hershey and dwindling time and stress chasing us. Where the hell is Bandit? I leave Ozzy home if I go far. He's got that Short Leg Syndrome.