i have too many things.  these things keep me here.  for how would i move my amniotic items, who would want these things, who could need and buy my broken miscellany?  rather these things be burned.  but i couldn't throw that away, it was a gift.  how better to show ungratefulness in the faces of the fantastic people who once wanted things for me.  and the structure of these things, created by people; the destruction in the smolder makes me sick.  i think of teddy bears rotting in a dump.  baby birds from islands far away, across the planet, in the most isolated areas on earth, are still found with plastic trash in their downy bodies.  no, i couldn't throw these things away.  i am an empty space among things.  i am this amount of money, i am this collection of sculpted granite, plastic, glass elephants.  i am made of candle wax and useless, synthetic material, all new.  my utility stretches the length of the unused rulers in my several drawers.  these things make me.  i am this much, and not much more.  engulfed by these things in a sac, here i am, curled up in my small breathing room, darkened.  and ibuprofen taken in fours.  i wake up with headaches that won't go away with coffee, water, peace, exercise, ingenuity, grace, forgiveness.  they will not go away.  after sleeping ten, twelve hours, they will not go away.  i cannot forgive them.  no bids on eBay.  so the truth comes out:  nobody buys me.  i used to get so angry.  i would throw things, see.  i destroyed things that were beautiful and hurt the people who wanted me.  and now nobody wants my things, though they must all go away.  i must destroy them all again, to make more space for the waning disposition in the back of my brain.  the gray matter, that's what matters.  that's what creates me, and it controls how i create.  i cannot travel outside of my mind meat.  i cannot create to make up for these things i destroyed, and i cannot be forgiven.  i am this much.  an inch or two of room for me to exist.  and is the soul made out of dust and rubber?  if so, it must be sold.  given away, maybe.  it is a part of these things, though i do not know where i would go if i were freed of this caveman accumulation.  perhaps to dresden, i speak the language.  to know and not be known.  the strangers are much more strange to me when they have never known small-town america, and have never even conceived of this hollow, cluttered room.  so stuffed to the point of utter uselessness.  ah, so the utilitarians might say that i am not even human, i suppose.  my cup has not been imbued with all the functionality of humanity, and remains half empty.  half human, stretching out a day-by-day half life, getting longer by the foot.  and what of these books?  mostly read, and some looked at, a few skimmed, a few only here for a once in a lifetime reference (perhaps for a school project or a stint of curiosity long since vanished from my gray matter), several collections of my childhood fancy.  mystery and adventure.  this mantle of knick knacks and paraphernalia hails from my past and the pasts before mine.  with such an archive, i may accurately be considered a historian (with or without the halitosis…i couldn't tell you for lack of third party noses).  lately i haven't spoken in my sleep, though i couldn't say for certainly; there's no one there to talk to.  these things are tinted white and gray in the fashion of the silent film.  they act out the motions and emotions from their conceptions in my peripheral vision, sensational ****** expressions and dramatic gestures from the old south. waking and sleeping, they breathe in opposing time with me.  these things, they bury me.