Realization

I used to think realization was the feeling you got when your skin flared up and the hair on your arms turned into thin stalagmites, while your chest pushed into itself like a man-sized "return to sender" stamp dug into your skin.  I used to think it was when your head was so light that you couldn't stop it from rolling around, when your eyes darted across the room because everything was final and you wanted none of it.  I was wrong.  Realization is when all those stalagmites melt, cooling off your skin and then traveling through your arms and into your chest.  It washes away the ink of that stamp when it gets there, and then, impossibly, the inky water rises up into your head, weighing it down, locking your eyeballs in place, front and center.  All that static in your arms is gone, but a dull trickle of black water slowly falls through your chest, not so much an impression anymore, just a murky cloud pooling around your ribcage. 

Publishing

I forget what I'm even here for.  I wonder if it's the alcohol or some deep seated fear of scrutiny that's got me minimizing the script I logged in to blogspot ready to rip into for.  It's gotta be the alcohol.  The fear wouldn't let me log in in the first place, but it definitely would let me get far enough to find myself a couple sentences deep, desperately kicking against uncertainty to show I have something to say.  The fear doesn't want me to just back off, it wants me to humiliate myself on a worldwide scale so that every other time I try and present myself to an audience it has ammunition cocked and loading, firing, 'you're worthless and you goddamned know it,' ripping into my cheeks, catching my neck and scraping the skin right off of my chest so that I never make the mistake of allowing myself to be seen to an outside world again.  Well, tonight I  escaped the shotgun scattershot.  Tonight I made it to the publishing page and even though I've long since forgotten what I came here to say, the pulsating need to say something has kept me on the dial.  I don't know why I'm here, but I do know that somebody out there needs to hear it.  If they don't, I'll just up and burst into millions of strings of confetti.  You can use the cut up strips of my being to celebrate your next big party.