I am.

I am red-eyed, tight-lipped, searching, searching.

Born from the womb a silent mess.

Gales of wind and throngs of flames slashing through the treetops. The wildest storms that pitch burly men off shipsides and tear the shoeless from their mud-thatched homes. Hemingway and Keats and Poe and Aristotle and Huxeley and Plato. Tangled philosophies, morals erased and rewritten and erased and rewritten. Poets and storms and anger and love crumpled up and shoved into a

neat, clean skin.

Stretched and bound, like a new, leather journal. Wrinkleless, smooth.

Bottled and corked tightly, a crisp sauvignon. Corked so tightly, as a matter of fact, that it can't be drunk.

It's just as well.

There's too much strife in Pandora's box. Too much love and too much hate and too much music

and far, far too much poetry.

Of course, that's the most dangerous of them all.

So here I'll sit, corked and calm, tasting the color of the tornado in my gut.

Maybe one day, the plug will be pulled. My god, may the world be spared. But maybe it won't

and until that hypothetical, unknown day.......

I am waiting; you are waiting. For what? I don't know. Or maybe I do.

"I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern."

Me too, Mr. O'Hara.