An Institute of Higher Yearning

I just want to go home. Step inside the door and feel the weight of world made bearable by a backpack just fall off my shoulders. I want to sit down on an unfamiliar couch that feels invitingly informal. My shoulders would drop a few inches more and I'd exhale everything I've wanted to bare. The wanting would be done and maybe we would have a conversation or two while watching this glowing-awkward box as the focal point of our words. We could speak whole sentences with no destination but a closer proximity. We could float them up to that place that tangles prayers like a dream catcher. I could whisper to you the stillness I feel in this place and you could nod with your eyes instead of your head. We could both think this novel and choose to read between the lines. We could pretend to go at full speed when everything happened in slow motion. We could live a memory life, slowed by age. We could break our ribs and let our hearts grow in the same syncopation. Inhale until we teemed like blow fish and exhale to take flight like falling. You could throw stones at these glass exteriors. You could give them veins and bring them to life in the breakdown. We could hold hands for the first time knowing. You could prove that walls can't stand between us. We could sit while the past dismantled to the floor and choose to fix the pieces in better places. Or maybe we could just comb through the shards for a scrapbook sharper than the rest. I'd leave my fingerprints all over the pages just to say I'd been there but had never lingered. I'll happen there again, to show you my hands, when the dust settles. You can take me to print and validate every time we've ever fallen.

Where the Earth Cradles the Sky

There's a place I discovered in the alley heading from Court St. to Kantner Hall that I want to share with the world. I was contemplating Midnight in Paris, the bricked rues to which the cities lay claims, the commencement of my 4th year in Athens, and the importance of footsteps to Cagean symphonies. I happened on a stretch of brick to my left that met the vertical bricks of the building that lined it. Here there was an ordinary drain pipe that I'm sure has outlived any student I have known to walk these same bricks as I. A small, yet lively, puddle had formed under the pipe where years of rain nestled so closely and oft that the brick had reformed around the years of puddles.

 So here I was, an alley at dusk after a great film, and I just stop and watch this small body of water dance. An old muse, to which I've dedicated such time to through my life that I now consider it more of a friend, captured me once more.


This groove in a small heavily traversed alley is representative of decades--even a century of rain fall. It's a cradle for the sky. A nest of all eternity. Soul mates, fitting puzzle pieces of the city together since the advent of the town. A place where a gaze can be flattened into the environment it usually streamlines through. Well, I'm not sure of this at all but there is pleasantry to it.

Though that's not even as I prefer to think of it. I much rather prefer to think of myself as a body of water, which is all too 90-some-odd% true. I like to think I know the stability of earth wrapping around me. The comfort of running into an old friend so many times that we both just melt into one giant puzzle piece. The lines are blurred, the brick is seen only through the puddle. Nestled as they are they continue because of one another, whether in spite, spirit, or sublimation. They could not exist any other way.

Why would they want to?