I can only write when I am adequately inspired, but inspiration is a fickle gift. It comes to call unexpectedly, like a rude and presumptuous guest, and then strips all resources, eats all nourishment, and leaves unannounced.

My brain is on too tight today.

No words can get out, but I can see them, feel them, hear them arranging themselves together in patterns, lining up experimentally next to each other in the confined spaces I allow. I write nothing—for when they are ready, they appear fully formed. I cannot take responsibility for the brilliance or the disaster that appears; I am freed only to watch, uninvolved with the carnage form on the page. It is of me but not mine, a bastard creation. Delicate like lions on a distant African plain. Walking. Stopping. Waiting. Pausing to scratch, to yawn, to sit—but always watching. I am always watching. I read of ideas found and lost and wonder, where are mine? Where do I keep them locked up?

A lost glory and a classic story yield nothing but that which brings you to tears, for nothing else really matters. There is nothing else to feel but feeling itself; everything else is based in lies and false pretenses of perception and thought. I forgot myself and the tree branch grows around me, eventually waiting to entomb me. I couldn’t breathe for months and now I never will, for breath has failed me, but I need it not. I write this from the grave. I am both here and there, up and down, gone and back again.

When you die, you are both here in memory and there in the ground at the same instant, but which one really holds you? Your body is a shell. I was led astray by this. Do not believe what I am saying, for I am actually saying nothing at all. As you read, you speak my words to yourself but I am saying nothing. I will say it again. I am saying nothing. I am dead. What is the use of me if you have commandeered my ship? Am I still captain, or do I become something else? Is a deposed king still a king or is he merely a headless man? I am no longer here because I have lost control of everything. My very penstrokes are unruly and threaten to desert me. They rebel against me by the work of my own hand.

The audience would walk out quickly and quietly were this a play, for this is not meant for spoken word. Two places at the same time is my theme, you see. Down and up, here and there, exist and perish, there is no timeline anymore. There is no chronology. You read what I have written after I have written it, but what if you thought of it before it was written? Will these words stay with you on your marriage day or until the day you die? You will remember this nonsense page of words, for that is all it is, but it will sustain you in some unknown capacity until you are no longer capable of remembering anything at all. When you least expect it, it will appear fully formed in your head just as it did in mine. The only difference between us, then, is that I thought it first.

When you read, you are trapped inside your own head. When you speak, you are trapped inside the minds of others. Not to speak is the most brilliant action and not to write is a crime. To write is to imprison the minds of others, even for the briefest time.

I will not be recognized for anything and the thought of this anonymity is deafening in comparison to the cacophony of noise to which I am accustomed. The silence is maddening but no one seems to care. You will carry on like a blind child and I will persevere, the lost voice among a sea of voices without faces, without eyes and mouths and hearts.

If these are my words, who am I? Do I matter? Are my words my life? Do they overtake my body and become my life? Once I am gone, when my physical form is buried, will memory be all that contains me? You have what you want from me. You will keep banging away until you find it, the truth I have hidden in these words, the one objective meaning for all of this horror. It was flawed from the beginning and was never meant to happen. A minute crack in the glass of the airplane window widened, exposing us all to the sun. We set ourselves up for the most wonderful failures. I will continue my non-existence, running towards disappearance, and endeavoring to fail, if only to deceive you.