There was a time when I used to write a great deal.

A time when writing organized my thoughts.

Now, they scatter at the distant scent of writing--wild things. Scattered statements. Fragmented sentences.

Why does the cup no longer hold water?

Why does sanity no longer gather at the bottom of the well?

Is my head so crowded because I would give up silence to drown out her voice? Would I give up peace itself to get peace from it?

Rage. Range, lashing out at random things. I am a bear in a cage at the center of my own mind, twitching, spurned, roaring at every passing thing.

I violated my body and burst until I cried; oh, what sweet relief when I cried... like the sore but grateful sting of gnarly ropes releasing their numb bondage.

But just a few minutes later, I was not crying anymore. I could not recall when I had stopped crying; I simply forgot that I was crying. Because I had started to think about things, again. And it stoppered up, before even a fraction of the pressure could be released. I hadn't even thought of something good to cry about yet.

No matter how deep or far I search for the meaning of life, the only thing that comes even close to providing an answer is Beethoven's music. Its transcendance is a transporter of the soul, lifting desperate stow-aways through the metaphorical clouds and into a form of heaven.

But I cannot become music. I cannot even become a musician. So this answer is useless to me.

Sometimes I rage that I was never put at the piano before my fat little fingers learned to count themselves; over and over again, I reconfirm that music is the only language my thoughts could ever truly have spoken.

I used to sit long nights at the computer, staring into an alternate world; one of blue humming vistas and dotted, black symbols, which, with the fatigue of moonlight, blurred into vast universes of color and story.

I need to expell; I need to be clean; I need to wipe this filth in my soul off me.

Prune.

Thorny branches fall to the earth and lay there, painless but gnarled and horrifying, like long strands of hair on the floor after scissors...

I want to eat roses and drink perfume.