The world is the shiny bald head of an infant,
an egg waiting to be cracked over a pan.
I imagine if the Earth would be dropped
from a great, great height it’d burst like
a water balloon at that child’s first birthday party
where they first learn the limits of their lungs and limbs.
We are constantly walking on eggshells,
the balance between the devil
and the deep blue sea, which must have been full
of drowned angels. Why else would the devil
be equal to the sea, this great emotionless body
which does nothing but keep us all in
its quiet embrace? If I am a body
and the sea is also a body
then perhaps we are all still stuck in that terrible womb
waiting for birth like a late-punched train ticket
and the conductor’s taken the day off.
If I shook the Earth, would we empty her heart
of all its salt and brine? I imagine the world
as a fist, clenched at nothing. Don’t get me
wrong, I love the Earth. I love being alive,
I love metaphor, I love the law
of gravity, keeping us tethered to the same point.
It’s just that the world is so large, so full
of all its emptiness that I want to
find a way to halve its length
and cut its radius like a slice of pie
if it could mean that we are back together on the same plate again.
That’s what the world does to us, you see,
cutting up our days into slices like
pancakes cooked on a Sunday
for nobody in particular to eat,
like stills from a video of a horrible train accident,
the conductor smiling, waving, back and forth,
like the waves of the sea, its surface
repeating and folding on itself again and again and again.

Freewriting Explanation: Every day, Valen shall use 5 minutes to write completely unprompted and uninterrupted, letting the words lead the way. There is no end purpose to each piece, but rather, the pieces are allowed to develop naturally in their own way. The pieces are then uploaded without edits.