The coffee won’t finish its descent down the ski slope of my throat. My nose was put in restraints when I got sick a year ago. Now, nothing seems to prevent it from tightening up like a snake coiling up at the sound of a hiker’s leaf-scuffling boot step.

I type words onto the purgatory-like empty whiteness of the blank page while I snort, a pig in his pen blowing his alarm, one scream into the mud-brained tissue of dissatisfaction after another.

A kind of psychological acne pad, maybe through writing I can clear the grey from the sky in my head, and then make it fall off like one that’s rolled away from the soft guillotine of mindfulness.

If I can clear one office argument up in the unconscious without having to have a union of opposites intervene first, then I have done my real job for the day.

After that, I can face the clown-teared, wage-earning part of the day with a smile smeared across my face, ear to ear, behind it, my feelings sniffing in their pens.