like an island with the sea roiling all around upon a lonely mountaintop with the smoke and the clouds drifting below

the sign says: you are free to dance within the painted lines romp around naked and drunk and delirious within the pre-apportioned space

and it is not the long arm of the Law or the Commandments of God but the hard iron will of Mother Nature that keeps you bound to this constrained space

looking back upon the time passed the chronology slowing hardening like newly set concrete mulling over the decisions and indecisions of yesterday remembering the nights lying in bed pondering destiny waking from nightmares shrieking in a cold sweat as you dream that Fate pushes you over the precipice

and the answer to every question increasingly becomes it does not matter and nothing would have changed and the frettings and the unease of traipsing that thin line between disaster and stagnation (each in some weird way a synonym for death) becoming nothing more than the regular red line on a map representing your itinerary with well-spaced fuel stops along the way

as you sit in line before the toll booth each car admitted representing something like an eon of waiting you cannot go anywhere not backward certainly, but neither forward not until the appointed hour which comes like a thief stealing in the night