You put your pen down.

The windows give signs, but you forget to look for days that become rings on trees. There are desperate drives to clear the fog; and where you strain to see striated rock and cavern vistas that portend of vastness and peas under the mattress. You are the pea under the mattress.

Then you are the sleeper who twists and twitches to relieve aches long ago given to a brain that won’t be still, and becomes the thing you are on the outside. The churner, the skeptic, the follower, the outcast, the believer, the old woman with a deadly apple; and the one who takes it.

So you are the brain.

The pen remains on the table.

The brain must eke this out without extension or abbreviation; the waves must come in crashes and froth to leave gnarled wood, plastic bits from lands and loves, chopped up pieces of wholes; mashed and tangled and destroyed things that phoenix into art and treasure.

The psychic said you weren’t voicing the tangles, the bits and chops lodged in your throat held by circumstance, propriety, DNA and divinity. What would we become if I shouted those things? Would we return to the vastness? Disappear? I transform you to fog and vapor, but would I find you again?

Am I supposed to?

The psychic said no. I had a blue stone necklace, didn’t I? Wrap it around your neck she said, let it bring the waves, the unsaid, the gods, the vistas, the mountains and poison apples. Then stand there as they batter you into…?

Oh God, let’s not go there, you and I. I’ll remain standing, you just sit for a little and watch the sea. I won’t turn my back to the inevitable marching forward of three-quarters of the Earth’s volume and pressure and nothingness and everything. I’m not going to tell you when it comes.

Would that be OK?

I’ll leave my pen with you.

Because I’m not just standing, I’m walking in, I’m welcoming it. I’m washing it clean. It fills my mouth and drowns my voice and holds me up and howls its shadows.

YOU ARE THE PEA THE BRAIN THE CHURNER THE OUTCAST THE BELIEVER THE POISON THE CURE THE MOUNTAINS THE VISTAS THE SCREAMING THE WATCHER THE CHOPPED-UP PIECES OF WHOLES THE EVERYTHING AND NOTHING THE WAVE MEETER.

Pick up your pen.