Round to rounds / The break in half.

This summer, like two summers ago, I will be living by and beside myself, stretched alone for months on a decades old wood floor, my spine digging, wishing for a horse to ride through the surf, straight forever along this place between everything and nothing, no saddle, but aching for a cat I've barely known to step across my shins or my neck or anywhere, please, and remind me or take me away, fixing.

After that, who knows but God, and it is of little consequence today. And, of course, today is the first time since when that I write something that is not academic, and in wishing to show it today is the day that determines it not to be shown. So those essays, then, where everything is giving way to nothing, where the next weeks of nothing blot everything.

Conceive man without thought.

I wonder about the careers people have. There are baseball players and actors, yes, who have the opportunity to do what they wish to do for however long they like. But the others, everyone else and their daily bread, is who I wonder about, and whether they were consciously chosen or were assumed out of necessity, either for family or for the disappointment of losing the paid pastime they would wish for. Not in the sense of being a six year old who wishes and wills to be a pilot when they grow up, but when they are that grown up, faced with the moment they have to really choose--yet can do so only when that choice is shortened and the very sense of choice disappears because what they, as adults, may have been hoping to do, have been needing to do, is disallowed. Suffocated from that wished for choice either by lacking qualifications or discrimination or whatever inability. Oh-for-six means that one's aging, dry hopes, sitting in a gravel mess, can but live only in embarrassment beside the fresh seeds around him being carried off by their warm winds. Those baseball players may say that there is always next year, but if, what if, there is not. And what does one do with a gravel mess but learn to become a stone himself.

To cease upon the midnight.

Long ago, here, I wrote about levers and pulleys, and the sudden opportunities to dance when one is on your floor. The world whisks in such a way as to make a man's hands shake. Captured by circumstance, back then I had missed an element perhaps more impactful, it seems, to note of the world's wind that of course one must have come from elsewhere before, and by that course would see fit to step upon new floors, for new feet, where the dances differ and the company appeals. For, from head to toe, somewhere the steps must stumble here--perhaps the goofy hat, perhaps the lack of proper shoes, or somewhere in the length between. Even these materials can only poorly cover the drawings one may acquire across one's skin. Their ink has a weight that may spill in the desired direction, pushing one's body to make its wished moves, but if come upon a mountainous obstacle its weight makes one to tumble back, stumble down. It is right out of that stumble, perhaps, that another's shining doors appear, and one bows out. The appeal of loose toes, yes, of quicker steps. And here one must meet that, bow out, or otherwise break in half in trying to stand with the winds and their pulleys.