What to write right? In the middle of the night, my mind is running feverishly like a fire, that wild California in the middle of July. It was supposed to be sustainable, rejuvenating the land. A process so natural, it cleans out the dead dry. Sometimes, though, the well cracks, the water table below the lines. Ideas become roadblocks. Traffic jams in the neurons. Neurotically obsessively compulsively trapped in a repeat of a phrase that hooked a deep sea fish with only a faint outline, just beneath the surface. Just about to rip through the surface when you hear a sound, a voice. Something calls you to attention.

It’s gone, you drift back into the fog. Thick, among trees stretching meters tall. Lost in the trails with no tracks. The fish is still on your mind but you lost the phrase, you hold fragments, written on some old parchment or was it a map. You are lost but you know the way. The light shines from the West and you see, something like the moonlight over the horizon.

The morning will approach, but my mind ripples. Stress is not quite the right word, when you know you know about you don’t remember what you know. In a moment of clarity, I find the phrase and I expand upon it. The neural connections sparkle like a thousand exploding stars.

To what point? Why? What? How? Questions swirl. The phrase made some sense, expanding like vines, gripping tighter with every repetition. You remember the worn staircase, a remnant of those who have stepped up. The future becomes the present becomes the past. Time goes on as I search for the ending. Needle in a haystack when you have so much to trim. Bonsai trees or just a random hedge in the suburbs. Subpar. This is the middle of the night.