Paper Guts

The ticking of the clock in the living room echoes my footsteps, my breathing, and my anxious heart beat. Something has robbed me of sleep and I am not myself until the pencil twirling around my fingers in the clumsy coping mechanism comforting only to the strangeness in my bones meets paper. Where my guts can spill in an array like sunshine on water across a page and cut through, not skin but my rain gray barren landscape mind. I am not myself, movie screen actress spiraling in graceful slow motion. the kind no one notices because they're cursed with braces in adulthood. Hiding from starry eyed children and anxiety ridden adults, I have not been myself. Pacing, with paper guts and pencil limbs.