laps

May 03, 2023

Article voiceover

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walking laps around an iron cage
a tiger dreams of something else…
the people bring his meals each day
and he’s given space enough to stretch

there’s slowness to his graceful stride
and restraint within his tired gaze —
eyes that don’t need rest so much
as different scenes to look upon

this dangerous beast does not know or care
that he’ll live much longer
than the ones who’ve come before

he only knows his patterned days
and trembles through darkened nights
of wild visions that cannot happen
and of places he won’t explore

Garbage Notes:

Maybe it’s obvious. Maybe it’s not. But I’m the tiger in this one. I wrote this while working the front desk at the rec center. I remember feeling the weight of all the monotony and all the sameness. The same people coming in and out. The same things happening at the same time every day. Show up, clock in, see all the same faces, say all the same phrases, hear all the same complaints. Nonstop. I felt like a prisoner.

There was an island in the center of the member services area. And I recall just pacing around, walking laps around that island. Countless tiny laps, wondering to myself what the actual distance was that I’d walk during an entire shift and yet still end up feeling like I had ventured nowhere.

My only escape would be to think of the stories that I’d write when I got out. I’d contemplate lines for poems. Hooks, premises, concepts for the next thing that might catapult me out of this life. Wondering if some idea could be born out of this tedium that might be the thing—or maybe the thing that gets me to the thing that eventually enables me to make a living as a writer.

Anything, anywhere but here, I remember thinking. Get me out of this cage.

I refused to plan for the future. And looking back into the past was unbearable because all I saw there was the tragic mess that had brought me to that point, to that trapped fate—living each hour, minute, and second like a beast with all his truest instincts stripped from him.

I don’t work at that front desk anymore. But I do still feel this way sometimes. I think we all do in some ways. We’re all much more wild than this world allows us to be. And it’s an unbearable pain sometimes to really think too much about it. So, we must find the things that make us free and keep moving toward them, even if only in our minds.

Franco Amati 2023