It’s the closest I get to dancing with strangers. From all sides, people can encroach on my space, accidentally or otherwise. Sometimes I have to remind them who’s space it is. Despite the closeness, we seldom spill. When the staff comes to clean up there is a weird slow confusion on the dance floor. Then, almost springing forward, our movement resumes and we’re all cruising, destinations in mind again. We’re driving, not dancing, but I don’t know why people are here if not to have a good time. I especially like overhearing music or laughter, witnessing gestures I can’t read. I like the way we have to trust each other, to at least some extent, all along the way.

This is my most prevalent craving these pandemic years: the moments among myriad strangers where we might take for granted their goodness. Dancing, at the movies, museums, in bowling alleys.. places we felt safe among the masses whether they were known to us or not. I find this now in traffic, I guess. I’ll apparently forage for human goodness in any dung heap. For better or worse, I can always find it.

(Printed with permission of the authors.)

Transcription, edited:

Far and near I smell scaredness

Even when there is not

A raven that smells fear

Right when you think you fear nothing I know you fear something

Transcription, edited:

Nice

October 8th

Reading is my favorite

Awesome

You who read vastness of sky as an invitation to your own expansive attendance,

hear in thunder’s bellow a call to stomp your feet,

you who carry yourself like a knife,

say yes,

you who would stop to smell any flower at all,

seek solitude for the company,

you who know the rhythms of secret drums,

laugh relentless,

you who keep your hearth aglow in even the boldest storms:

Come find me, won’t you? i want to play.