Mature at Ends

My mind needs the balance of demands, he told her, not knowing which way to agree with. So what does it mean
to be free to intend?

Already having been his example for twenty years, it was easy enough to swim around in. A
ghost-ladder of explanation swallowing an answer. To be the literal playground of a choice.
A limit.

Inside of which the antecedent chain of internalized shadows, ancestral as inhalation inside a sneeze, corral, no
horse, stasis overdose of running minus legs, has a field day containing fulfillment. Both of them were more than they
could handle, but in excess of what they could contain. And this, for lack of a convention more original,
they called love.

Which passing mirrors would echo as dependence. Because it feels like this, so often. With less time to
myself, but fiercely, involuntarily focused, what's left to think about itself, around its often problems, has a
concentrated richness. Where he stops, sated in arrival; departure point where she accepts him.

But I'm not that, I'm the man you are. Feeling like yourself when you're living for me. Not to say I'm some
feminine mist. Walk in, get lost, find yourself. And in the ambience I can't help but provide, since I'm it,
landscapes forever retracting into the helpful, like glory rolling around in the inexperienced, concentrate
on exact details on how life
is bereft.

By the time I'd graduated the fourth grade, and didn't even know it, my sense of constant acceptance
was almost limitless. She said. And so was a return message, with double measure.

So you need it too? And even longer, it sounds like, than it needs you? The turn darkening the length
was surprising him.

Of course. Not a day doesn't pull me through that I don't wonder why I am so definitely inside it. The kids,
their father, the country, its opposite, the people, their abstract collective involved in literal and responsive
war. Every time a cup meets my reach, out of the cupboard, I'm both less and more than its
author--but never exactly the precisely.

The more I think back, she said, hearing his pressure, from the beyond of myself, the less
I can demand it.