squaring off

The word 'cull' looks and sounds pleasing to me.  But it connotes something nefarious when the word appears in a discussion about wildlife or livestock.  Nothing more.  I return from a six-month hiatus.  But I never went anywhere.  'Sabbatical.'  That word harbors more selective emotions.  I do not particularly enjoy the way it looks but the sound of it intrigues me well enough.  But, after all, it means nothing, to me, in its irrelevance with my own life.  I recall things, in bed.  But I leave the bed and the things leave too.  Or they stay there.  I am quite unsure of which.  One should not talk that way.  It is not a feasible pronoun.  No, I meant to say 'palpable.'  Odd, though in a manner of some peripheral interest.  That feels right there.  Four clicks upon the digitized odometer.  Carries itself out in a single motion.  Fascinating, the lack of ocular immediacy.  That, however, feels incorrect.  Direly distasteful.  Do not equate this to the re-reading of something else.  We are not related.  A simple image escapes me.  Just coming up with a basic human representation.  A symbolic gesture.  But even that is too much.  I desire something even more essential.  Teeth snapped like fireworks.  Only less like rubberbands.  Taxidermied things impress and repel me.  Or impress me in their ability to deter.  Or disgust me in their awe.  I do not know.  Just like I do not know why I fail to employ a contraction.  A contradiction.  We paradoxicate the air under the circus-like tent of pretense.  That fits.  But it is still like putting socks on a chicken.  A paramount expression.  Lights and petroleum jelly.  A rattlesnake bite kit in a giant silicone pill.  Guidebooks inherited decades too late.  Indian Paintbrushes.  I thought these things.  I conjured these unstories.  The fish, they swim.  The elk, they flee.  Why do these sparrows cheep at two in the morning?  Noises typically frighten me and certainly at this hour.