Debreathe + Jackpot
I’ve been working out regularly, three to four times a week, at a strength gym. I know how to deadlift, how to pick up more than I ever thought I could and stand straight backed with it, without flinching. I know how to bench-press, from my back, laid out, and lift the weight over me until I can escape from underneath it. I’ve figured how to trust my muscles. Creatively I’ve been training as well, thirty poems in thirty days, is a lot of weight. By the end I felt almost a madness in how I was approaching writing, like I was a spider armed man reaching into books and ripping out words and pages to lick and stick to the wall. As good as the exercise feels in the moment catching your breath afterwards comes with the full sense of acknowledgement that you are now on the other side of wherever you were. You can exhale, sigh, let the spindle inside of you bring back in all the effort and determination and creative force you exerted, to put them back into the jars inside you so they can grow in the glass like mold until they’re full. The breathing in the moment of working to get a poem out or swing a heavier kettle bell is so necessary, maybe more necessary than the breathes we take just walking around. When you stop that breathing, when you reach the break, knowing full well you are going back into the full swing, and when you catch that breath, that is a feeling to be reveled in.
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(I just really think it is soo funny to use the term “we hit the jackpot” in Las Vegas in any other context than hitting an actual jackpot.)
We sat down willing to lose
and disillusioned to the grandeur available
When the dealer flips the nine of swords
and the crowd behind lets out sighs
Chips have fallen where they may
and Fate’s soft touch only grazed us
Floating on the hopes we had
and someone slips ten dollars in our pockets
Blind confidence is still confidence
and a fool taking chances has a better chance than
The bystanders in the crowd murmuring into coat folds
and fickle Fate has to concede at some point
and introduce us to Destiny