success means you tried so does failure

• to accept this event with humility [will];

• to treat this person as he should be treated [action];

• to approach this thought with care, so that nothing irrational creeps in [perception].

We find the same triad rephrased and reordered in Meditations 9.6:

"Objective judgment... Unselfish action... Willing acceptance...of all external events."

And we find it in a more subtle form underlying Meditations 8.7:

...progress for a rational mind means not accepting falsehood or uncertainty in its perceptions, making unselfish actions its only aim, seeking and shunning only the things it has control over, embracing what nature demands of it-the nature in which it participates, as the leaf's nature does in the tree's.

And God, if you are listening, I do worry. God, if you are listening, I count the miles between my body and the body of the person I love and I worry about each of them. God, I worry about the planes we take to each other and the sky that might not hold them. God, I wear seatbelts and visit the graves of my friends in spring to kick away the dirt from winter. God, it is just us talking now, and I worry about everything I can't control. God, can you tell me how much longer I'll get to be alive and in love. God, I am sorry for the times I didn't want to stick around. God, there is a scroll of things I have taken for granted in order to survive this long, and it is endless.

And it is maybe too late to want to live forever after everything I've seen and done. But there are freeways between me and the person I love, God. And I don't have enough time to travel all of them. I worry that I can't bend them all into a giant circle from where I begin to where she begins. God, I don't know what I believe in except the shrinking of distance. God, do you worry about the things you can control? I am enough in love to worry about everything that might cast a shadow over it.

God, I have touched the living face of a person I love with the same hands I have touched the dying face of someone I love and none of that seems fair.

the gelastic vigilantes of the loosened tongue like rain, antimicrobial flame upon this mortal thrush, redeemed like Prometheus into tomes and werewolves. the loop of conversation, its reliance on liminal measurements of attempted consensus and partially solved puzzles; eye contact a woman strayned too far from the well, the evacuated space like an unread book: the Complete Works of a Sad Sack with no dust jacket.

and there are still so many ways to not matter; the repeated soul-baring throughout history, petitions from temporary mountains under the infertile curdle of the repetitive moon; the scraps of nightmares like euplastic plankton that nourish the midnight adulterers cheating on noon.

the doomy clouds wayward scroll, couriering the light pollution of gelded dreams and compromised bedtimes; the penal hormones of cold youth and adrift distractions of a stranded mind; the existential sprawl of a lover on call and an always-on deadline.

the relic of eternity is discarded like a long lost frivolity, a divulging shade in the shadow of a different moon; the omens of the gas station signage marking the ways gone wrong, an unprecedented pandemic of regret still onshoring; ruminating like a 24hr laundromat, vacillations of coin and sweat; dry cleaning for nudes.

unrest is the underground crest of the bashed in heart circulating back to this square empire cashing in what it can't have. alcohol can only do so much lubricating and the universe is not big enough to apologize. so many departures sent too soon... to await the impossible and its reclamation but for the empty parking spaces.

Musica: Have A Cigar

Banda: Pink Floyd