scatter.

Tether me faster, please.

My thoughts are taking off at an unsettling rate, migrating—where else?—south.

Nothing quite fits; everything's a bulging chrysalis emanating nervous energy.

Stop the presses. Start the war.

Stick me down fast. Glue me like a wrinkled piece of a carefully cut magazine photograph on the foam board of a fifth-grade art project.

I'm a bag of marbles that have lost their boy.

Somebody get in here quickly, if it's all the same to you, and put my chains back on, those little steel ellipses I can't stop cutting through with my own razor-sharp self-loathing.

The whole world gestures with an unquestioning expectancy of sanity, dragging at my feet like a dying magnet.

Something about oysters, and a stage...

It's too late for sweet dreams, though, because I've been completely jigsawed, thanks very much, and I could swear a corner is missing.