If you want it, come and claim it

I can't tell if it's the need to move or the need to stay still. I'm a live wire, all supine laziness wrapped around a core of potential energy that could be explosive, or could simply be flammable. Either way, my colors scream hazard and danger and enter at your own risk, but only if you know how to read the signs.

At least the fallout I leave in my wake isn't radioactive. It's not shards of glass turning to cement in the lungs. It's not belching white clouds of poison. It's not ancient jungles spilled across a rolling sea, poisoning the living with the remains of the dead. I try not to break any more hearts except mine, because the crater shouldn't have a body count when I inevitably implode under the pressure of standing in the grocery line and asking myself if this is the correct zip code.

I'm not an entertainer, but I am somehow a troubadour, a jester, a clown. Juggler! tossing spheres into the air. Dishes, and paying taxes, and watering the plants, and organizing my objects, and remembering my thousand-and-one alarms mean things other than noise-must-die. I toss and catch and toss and catch, and some spheres become heavier, and some spheres are forgotten on the floor, and I can't stop the music or stop the movements of each delicate spun-world around the gravity of living that I've become bound to, this time around. I can't drop them, because some can bounce but some will crumble and most will shatter into a rain of fragments that cannot ever be spun back into shape ever again.

There's an ache between my teeth, and I'm careful not to clench my jaw around the crunch of phantom bones. Marrow from the grill is no substitute for the decadence inherent in the fight for survival, blood for the living and stones for the dead and between those two things, a supernova trapped in simple mortal flesh. The ache of a phantom memory like the craving for a specific cuisine or dish, the soul craving sustenance the same way the body craves what it lacks.

If I could set this crown aside, I would. Alas, I fear that it must be taken from me by force of arms, and turned into a collar that I don't hold the leash for. I've felt weightless and I've felt euphoria and I've felt relief, but I haven't felt the yank of a leash that could make me trust that it would hold me at bay, would keep my snapping teeth and swiping claws away from vulnerable soft underbelly. I've yet to meet a lock that I could not pick with either a twist of wire or a thick stuffing of explosive putty. C-4 needs shock and ignition to detonate, and I've got plenty of both that I'd endure for the chance to do the same. I've yet to meet a hand that feeds that I wouldn't just as soon bite, just to make sure that it wants to be feeding me and isn't merely obliged to do it by social convention.