Once more I wake in the post-meridian, and once more I shuffle through the foreshortened day. By now it’s beginning to catch up with me, and this time it is early when I begin to feel the crash, ten or eleven PM. I think that if I can let it roll over me, hmmm, maybe I can set things to rights. I read. I lie down in darkness long before midnight, and I sleep a solid hour before waking again with the agitated feeling.

I very nearly get out of bed. But my body is so very deeply heavy that I fight back the urge, and the fighting is not completely counterproductive this time.

I lie in twilight trance and this time there are no fuckwit academic functionaries virtually present.

Instead the anxiety takes a form from the earliest days of my independent adulthood.

This is a story that I don’t want to get out, at least not without perfect control over it, and that desire butts heads violently with the notion of a spill.

For many years I told it to no one, except piecemeal to my most intimate lovers. Looking back I can see that I didn’t really even tell it to myself, even when I felt it most deeply and acutely. My failure to do so is the source of all my failures.

From about fifteen to twenty-three, I was deviled by a medical condition, untreated at the time, which (even treated, symptomatically) defines and shapes my deepest identities to this day. All spilling aside, a reader, an observer, even a loving family member cannot hope to understand who I am without knowing this story.

Yet I’m proscribed from telling it (even to myself sometimes as I say), by this deeply fearful desire to control the narrative and thus hold tight rein on my true identity.

(I’m Batman. No. It’s wound far more into the muscle than even that.)

“The net will bounce him and then he bounces himself all too often too. The effect of the motion is a perception of flightiness and uncertainty that is neither male or female, neither top or bottom, neither hot nor cold.

And the question the poem poses to him becomes: Who would want that?

The answer, conversely, is left as an exercise for the reader.”

In the case of some rando it’s easy enough to sum up neatly and cleverly that way. But in the case of this artist we are calling the vairtere, it won’t do at all, not by half.

Something has to give.

I have to give.

Unless I can bring myself to give, this long winding life will have been wasted truly.

This is the moment when creaking limbs decide at last to unfold finally, or let fear win.

Feels existential.