I awoke to unravel.  The word.  The verb.  I don’t know why.  I listen to my heart beat. Listen to the seemingly endless thud, thud, thud. It pauses and flutters and then as if I hit refresh, continues to bump along. I guess many things would unravel should the beat fail. Unravel, as in fail. Or loosen. Untangle. Undo.

I eat and dress and go into the backyard. Geese fly overhead.  South. North. They fly upriver and just as soon come back. Back and forth. Back and forth they go.

I get confused sometimes. About direct objects. Transitive and non transitive. Regular and irregular. I mean how can I make sense of anything if verbs confuse me? I like things simple. I walk the road. I open the door. I put wood on the fire. I stare out the window. It rains. I wait. I mean who doesn’t? Wait. Stare. Funny verb  wait is. Wait implies the doing of nothing. Unravel might follow depending upon what it is the waiting is for.

There is nothing else quite like a verb. They are. Then they’re not. I mean you’re swimming and then you’re not. You move onto the next verb. That’s the thing. You’re usually not in between verbs long. They tend to dominate like that. Either you’re say, swimming, or you’re not. You could,  of course,  be doing many things at the same time,  like breathing or laughing or yelling. Maybe you’re yelling because you’re not swimming anymore.  You’re drowning. The thing is you’ve moved onto the next verb.

Chose your verbs well, I tell my son. They become you and you them. I don’t mention unravel or drown. Or pirating or sword fighting, though he’s enamored of such things right now. Chose well the verbs you want to use. Who knows where they might lead. It’s exciting really. Especially at the beginning. So many verbs. Maybe you’ll choose love and marriage. Perhaps building. Or climbing. Drawing. Composing. Maybe singing or rafting. Experimenting would be good, though not too much or for too long. It might lead to failure. An unraveling of sorts.

Unravel. That’s the verb where we begin to fail. The start toward the end. Who knows what starts the unravel. Maybe it’s just where we start again. Like a knitted sweater or a scarf that just doesn’t work out.  We take the threads apart, separate one strand from another so we can weave them into something newer and different. Maybe better.

Or we find ourselves in a broken bus by the river. A shack in the woods. Wandering from town to town, home to home until there is no home. We’ve all seen it, haven’t we? Sometimes it’s a young girl with a baby. I give her money but then she’s there again in the parking lot the next week. There are the drunken men by the market, the ones with no teeth,  sitting curbside.  Smiling. Or those we pass, chattering to themselves, pushing grocery carts full of belongings.

We ignore them best we can. Maybe it’s the ones that stand outside the theater when we come out happy and satisfied from a show, in our best clothes and a bit of lip stick. Just a little change, they say.  Most everyone looks away, irritated.

It should be the simplest thing really. To sow and reap. Sow and reap. Choose your path, choose your way, choose your verbs carefully. What of the bugs, the weather, the deer, voles, the mice or slugs? Can you plan for such things? So many things you say and wring your hands. So many things can go awry. There’s no guarantee what noun you’ll end with. Or adjective. Or verb.  There’s no promise. Give and it shall be given unto you,  your cup runneth over, shall men give into your bosom and all that kind of talk. Reap what you will. Judge not that you be judged. There but by the grace go I. I don’t know. Do your best. Exist. Give. Be kind.