fused ovenbird I agreed to have my soul fused to my body. The soul, you see, is only basted to your edges and is prone to slipping, like a bookmark from the pages of your favourite novel, like a dream from your mind when you wake. There is a procedure, esoteric and not always successful, that allows the soul to be permanently secured to the body. Of course, there are side-effects, a stunting of the imagination, for example, since the imagination requires a highly mobile soul, a narrowing of spiritual vision. It will make you immortal but a tethered soul is a restless thing and you may find that its frantic attempts to escape are not exactly pleasant. Entrapping the soul is like a contraction in reverse, like everything drawing inward, like becoming cavernous, enclosed and isolated from the light. Afterwards you hum with pregnant energy but there’s no hope of release from your gestation and attempts at sublimation will fail. You achieve eternity but find that it is gray. Existential dread, it turns out, is generative. Motivation requires a closing window of opportunity. I would undo it, but all those who knew the incantations are gone, driven mad by their own expanding infinities. They released each other into darkness and left the rest of us stranded. Once I carved my name into red shale, made permanent the shape of my dwindling days, but now…now there is no reason when all I can do is persist. Living and living and living without any urgency at all. 260901 what's it to you? who go blather from