Tied Down

Sometimes I get sentimental on the bike ride home. Passing underneath the dark boughs of the park makes me want to embrace their uncertainty and let my bike skip the pavement; topple me sideways and clumsy into the grass.

I imagine rubbing my face in it's cold sure palms, letting it poke between my eyelids or along my face; kissing my inner ear. I could just lay there a while and hope nobody found me, hope a snow plow could cover me, just for a while so it could be me and the tiny inexperienced fingers of the grass. All I ask is a season or two, until the frost thawed and poured from my caved chest like a tidal pool and the new flowers could spring up, coil and set me loose again.

Other times I find myself howling mad as I speed down towards the hill. Possessed I whisper to myself, "If not tonight, some other night to be certain." As though the speed or the flight sync the present me to the reflected me; the refracted me splayed up on some future wall where all the flowers have gone. I've always felt that some day I'd become quite insane, that eventually the bathwater would run two drops too low and consume me; tearing me from my body in a sucking gurgling whirlpool. "Keep fighting, but know that I'll win."

Is it truly so wicked to want to disappear, just for a while? To take a vacation from the self? On reflection it's not the uncertainty of twisted boughs I seek in those drunken maudlin minutes, but rather the certainty their shadows promise; their potential for oblivion. A sweet temporary rush of blood to and then away and a flash so hot and so bright that for seven seconds there'd be . However, wicked or not I'm still fighting-- or trying to fight and right now that seems a reasonable amount to do, just to hold the ebb high while when the moon's sliding lower. Hold the ebb high, just for a little while, if you can, I mean.