From an article on the life of George C. Scott:

"Acting was his life. He wasn't himself if he wasn't acting."

Give it a minute.
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There you go.

Rolling up the hill
A snowball in reverse
Losing momentum
Gaining altitude
Diminishing
The sharp scent of ozone
Replacing the soft aroma of pine
Below
And the world is white
Up here
With great outcroppings of dark rock
The occasional obstacle
Somehow
It gets by
But not without
Leaving a bit of itself
Behind

Rolling up the mountain side
A speck
An imperfection
To blend into the landscape
All that sky
The opposite of gravity
Though the pull is the same

Rolling toward the peak
It cannot be stopped
Not now
Forward to a beginning
Searching for an end
And hardly a trail to be seen
In the soft white snow

I shot myself in the head with an empty gun
And the condition took
Ideas as confetti flew out the other side
Turned to birds
And left me here

Without a net
Without their sing-song voice to call them back
I silently watch the sky

Sometimes they perch tauntingly on my windowsill
And I believe them
Like an empty promise
Sometimes I run to catch them
'Til my legs and lungs burn with the same fire
As if they'd kept their word

They took to freedom like lifers
Ignorant
Of the damage they'd done me
Both now
And before and
Their kindness is often overshadowed
The dream
Their gift
All that I am
Was never enough

I finger the blank pages they left behind
Like open wounds I'm not quite sure
I want to heal
It's so hard to choose a favorite curse
And so I hate them with my love

And with my love
I trace
Eternal circles.

He sees himself in the third
Person
A curious construction of tissue
Cells, conduits
Systems

Is there a face
Underneath that hair
A man
Beneath those ideas

He is nothing out of
Context
The result of perceptions
More your ideas
Than his own

Would he exist
If you closed your eyes

The page contains him
When the world cannot
Flesh becomes words
A bit of soul in every hanging
Syllable
A death in every period

Your hand
Resting so delicately on his shoulder
Means everything

To him
Over the porcelain goddess
Evening
Hangs delicately
And open-endedly
Perplexed
And dawn never
Wonders

In absolute submission
To your grief
Or his relentless rage

Sour lips
Untouched
Dwindle

And desire leaves
The lonely echo
For all to hear
Save one.

Like mortar fire
It impacted somewhere between my eyes
Flashes of crackling glitter
Swirling in firework arcs across my
Corneas
My cerebellum

Every dendrite fired at once
Synapses lit up
Like a city skyline at dusk
A blinding nova of pure inspiration

Now I ride the shockwave
Quietly wondering
How long the memory will sustain
Me