For this round, the only one I’ll remember, I live in a poet’s body. Despite my early aims towards science my brain spins wildly in all directions like an electron cloud, at any moment my point at best a probability. My feet long to feel the earth, and are cut for it, only to return again to draw new patterns of scars. My heart sends me lunging in odd directions until it finds something that will crack it. My stomach writhes and turns and my moving muscles burn as I try to walk it off through thin woods, over muddy waters, past bright green poison ivy. I should be at work right now. Some job, earning money, but instead I’m wrestling with my poet body, striving to find a hold that will keep me in check long enough to squeeze until a few sweaty drops of beauty fall onto a page or evaporate into waves that gently move eardrums and hearts. The struggle ends, little better than its start. I emerge hungry and exhausted and my society chides me for having wasted time, threatens not to feed me, and then places more bright lights and sharp stones in my path to send me off into the woods again.

Epilogue:

Returning up the path, I walk slowly at the center of a stream of joggers with their dog entourages. I’m sweeping a banana through the air, idly practicing knife fighting techniques learned while making a training video with an old Cuban man years ago. Somewhere at the tip of a still hidden grin, my philosopher’s sense of humor begins to twinkle faintly. Somewhere just behind me, the three law students that just ran past make jungle noises.

Also:

It’s easy to feel the great depth of life after falling into a dark well.
Don’t forget that, all along your journey, the sky above was infinitely vast.