The Trampoline

You find yourself aloft; in the air with gravity pulling you down, down, down, quickly and without mercy. And there is a brief joy before the fear of falling arrests you and pulls your eyes and spirit down to view your fall. Below, you see only blackness in an instant. Are there edges? There are edges but they won’t help you. You are falling. Fear fills your lungs, blood rushes to muscles for futile flexes and actions. But you land and it is soft and curves to you, fits you, tensions you and holds you at the bottom of a pendulum for as long as you both are permitted before, before, before you are thrown again into the air to reach an apex you will also hold as long as you are permitted. You are not permitted to not fall and rise; fall and rise you must. Fall and rise you will. Others crowd the trampoline, thrown onto it just like you. Fall and rise they must. You are not alone. The conditions are finite, there are bounds and there are edges, the means for survival are limited. Do what you must for fall and rise you must. Make way make room, over the edges spills the possibility of the impossibility like the organic from the inorganic, like the consciousness that devours fate; the choice that renders no future choices. You have been secreting time rising and falling, projecting a future in the context of your past falls and risings. The bounds the edges are the light beyond the blackness of one sort to another.  Joys and fears inform your future; both joys and fears certainly not one or the other. This existence (or is it life?) won’t admit a forced dichotomy. How long has it been? The rising and the falling? Avoiding the edges by recognizing them? How discrete how fractured how contiguous? The edge nears and that horrible birth made the edge real from the moment of one birth and all births. Over the edge you will spill and neither rise nor fall but neither rise nor fall you must. Your ownmost possibility which cannot be outstripped of neither falling nor rising awaits; you know it. You see it and feel it you projected the final projection. The rising and the falling went where? To nothing? You may despair and you may holler “love, love, love!” and let the words spill over the edges but you may not rise and you may not fall and your voice will quiet and meekly grow hoarse and go absolutely, darkly, sweetly… with relief…silent.