Swiped sucker sticks and the power that is

Lately I haven’t been sleeping. I wake up long before my alarm does and do not return to sleep. I buzz. I drive to work footless and buzzing and when my legs slip under my desk I begin: I read about sleep disorders. This is one of two ironic jobs I’ve held. The other is the summer at the air conditioner factory, which was not air-conditioned, during a particularly jungle Illinois summer. Yes, the grassland sometimes is the jungle in the summertime, air so thick you can sink your canines into it, chew it, put it between your hands, lather, and bathe in it. Only you won't get clean because no surface is free of the moisture. You just rub it around into new spirographs. I become a slug clung to a porch's railing. Illinois, for certain, is not the most humid place on this earthy ball, so I wonder what would happen to my body and lungs in more humid airs. Probably the wet would not suffocate me and my soul would adapt as environment challenges. I do not know the jungle.

Lately I feel in control of little, at least not at root. Things happen, passions shift, which I consider and then act on. Primordial shifting persists. Wordsworth, Shelley, you beautiful dreadful truthsayers! If a fast food worker can appear out of nowhere and defy all known paradigms by politely inquiring, "Are you finished with those?" and by those mean soggy white chewed-on sucker sticks having been placed on a greasy fast-food table, and if grassland can transfigure at whim into jungle and within it transfigure me accordingly without grip or clue, then each player must be subject to being acted upon and not a subject acting, objects trapped in the accusative case, all innocently acquiescent in the missionary hump, who simultaneously are the actors, in the sense of being both doers and shifting performers.