If I was a circus, I would be a giant birdcage built out of the catwalk. I would be gaudy and golden and enormous and layered and strung high in the rafters and tied down with truss and birds and steel. I would be heavy and awkward and ponderous and think too much about the structure of the cage and try to hard and wish too loudly I was free.
If I was a circus the top would get so heavy the bottom would fall out and millions of soft, silky feathers from Winslow Homer white to iridescent pinks and translucent greens like a mermaid train to Coney Island, would come tumbling out in cascades in rivulets in ocean liners in stadiums in droves in piles in snowstorms and sand dunes of soft, light as light, feathers.
They would be so thick a stagehand would enter stage right pushing the droves of so many feathers like sheep, until up out of the feathers the dancers and acrobats and jugglers and clowns would rise up and climb back up the birdcage, reclaiming the rafters and catwalk and stars, until they came tumbling down in rivulets of dancers and acrobats and circus and clowns; on trapeze on wires on bicycles on machines; on legs in hair over the tops of the heads lighted only by the bright eyes of so many, watching and wishing and waiting they would let go and let the bottom fall out.
But I am not a circus. I am a human a girl a person a woman and my self. I am huge I am skinny I am rich I am restless; I am sad I am happy I am rushing I am done. I am starting I am slow; I am too fast for the class I am lagging behind. I am poor I am wealthy I'm tired I'm boundless. I'm infinite I'm never I'm small I'm a mountain. I'm star stuff and a birdcage and trapped and free. The not falls out and the water rises up; the dancers keep dancing and the stage hand keeps sweeping. The feathers keep morphing into animals and a parade, into mountains and rivers and dancers and clowns; the ringmaster never arrives.
If I was a circus, I would be something every day that I'm not. I would be the bottom that falls out and the star stuff that manifests, because in this lifetime, the point where I break, is the point where I begin and in the most important part of me, I am a circus.
