This is the way it always begins.

This is the way it always begins. I’m no different. A dream from among the first upright moments in life. Grasping the shaky railing of an unstable crib, simultaneously transfixed, fearing, and fascinated by the flood of ghetto bird moonlight tracing across my room from a sky too low for heaven above but still over my head. I didn’t get it, but someone was clearly in control. I distinctly remember wondering then and there if, when the light found me, I would become a suspect, a criminal.

Now, four decades on, guilt a foregone conclusion, I know very well how to find my light, but even better how to recede into the darkness, still on my own, still waiting, contemplating, among the shadows in every possible moment.

Flat-footed, I still maintain that first stance from 40 years ago as an achievement worth repeating, leaning precariously, one at a time, on the outside edge of my feet, an unsure stance entirely assured of its identity. The gravitational clarity of flat feet denied, deferring to a desperate, hopeless plea against Earth’s pull out of respect, infatuation.

Forty years of stepping, one sole at a time scraping the concrete of a city too familiar and meandering. You see their virgin eyes upon arrival (No center! No there there!), but you know better, but you can’t explain. You can only stand (nobody walks), smile, hope for the best, that they can learn to find theirs in the sea of super lowest common flat surfaces and countless identifications lurking beneath, sandtraps of empty form without a mirror.

In such a forest, no one follows your steps. They can’t see a path you've no intention of marking, despite your occasional protestations.* Infrequently, finding your dimmest possible light, you stomp out a clearing, a window to let back out your store of ghetto bird moonlight, a frame betwixt and between through which you invite infinite peering, a canted, cracked mirror held uncertainly askance; a mute plea for sympathy; a distant, firm, loving embrace.

* “If I stop trying to define myself, would I still have something to struggle against?”