my love has concrete feet, my love is an iron ball wrapped around your ankles over the waterfall.

I wish I'd never had the coffee, wish I could sleep twelve hours straight, or go into a coma waiting for someone to shake me awake, but I gotta start shaking myself and so I take my dog out and walk us both to the point of exhaustion. I let the traffic lights dictate the path instead of waiting for them to change in my favor. Two hours later, I think I'm lost and it's getting dark. I don't feel like walking back and don't think I could find the way if I did feel like walking back. Then it takes fifteen minutes and a string of failures before I find my way home. The whole time, I'm thinking about the last book I read. It was about this man, a very successful man, partner in a law firm with a big house and all that, who had this mysterious affliction that forced him to walk until he passed out. It came and went. He'd be fine for months, a year, several, something, then it'd strike without warning. He'd get out of bed in the middle of the night to take a piss and find that on his way back from the bedroom, the legs steered him down the stairs and out the door. Even in the dead of winter. Then his wife would wake up in the morning, panicked, pained, and drive until she found him in a heap on a snowbank or curled up in somebody's yard, still barefoot and in his pajamas. They always called each other banana. And she'd say something like, wake up, banana, and give him a blanket and take him home and they'd both try not to cry. None of the doctors, scientists, mystical swamis could figure it out. He starts losing toes and fingers to frostbite, eventually leaves his family and resigns himself to living on the road inside a body that is against him. He starts to think of himself and his body as two separate entities, because he cannot control what it does. It was beautiful. Wake up, banana, time to go home.