Wednesday, I'm Supposing

Moving books around on the shelves, a quilt of my own making taking shape and standing solid against the wall. All those stories that have both saved and ruined me.

This image is somewhere on those shelves: the testicles of Uranus, bobbing in a moon-shattered sea, headed for Cyprus. What a foul and wonderful story.

Sleepless, I still have these moments where there is only one lost, endangered spot left sputtering sense in my skull. Some nights, though, it all gets fuzzed and disappears behind a scrim.

I would like to demand something bigger from my life, but that’s never been my racket, even if I once thought I would someday be everything. Yet, even now, expectations. If patience is a virtue, well, we can’t all be virtuous, certainly.

It’s a special type of ruination, to have to do all your dreaming awake, to be simultaneously sleepwalking and full of desire.

I always seem to be reduced to thinking about what I should be thinking about any of this.

Surely it’s not truly throwing up your arms to believe that someone will somehow speak to you. Somebody will eventually think of something and save us all.

And, since I’m just letting my fingers talk this morning, this: Can a man be a ringmaster, walk the highwire, and both be and tame the lion?

I take something sharp in my mouth, crude hook ground ragged and dangerous against stone. I swallow it unbaited, hoping to snag something gasping and desperate to live, wanting to yank it up out of me to flop and glimmer on the dark floor at my feet. All the while Blind Somebody Something howls from the speakers in the corner.

Now the bruised light is lapping at the windows and birds are stirring in the trees. Yet surely, still, this day brings with it at least one more pure opportunity to be stunned.