One contested definition of a circle is:
A polygon with an infinite number of sides...

- A woman in a pretty skirt walks to work at night aware of the stares she receives, ashamed to quietly be thankful for the attention.
- An old man looks at the crystal ball in his hand, glimmering and shiny, and suddenly understands mortality
- A young boy examines the body of his best friend, cries for hours, then places the dog’s collar around his wrist.
- An old lady suffers, unable to meet her own needs, and wonders where the children she ignored have gone.

- A young man finds his soul mate but loses himself in her.
- Forty-five teenagers wage war on Friday night, their screams of triumph pierce the night air, yet Saturday feels empty and tastes of despair.
- A middle-aged father of three hunts a fresh rose in the moonlight, unaware his wilted rose no longer has thorns.
- A woman in a business suit bangs against the glass, thick and heavy, and shudders when it fails to crack.

- A squinty-eyed man makes good on his debt after years of being gone, then walks off the roof of a forty-story building.
- A child of twelve is ignored by haggard-looking parents, yet cries go out when he, in turn, ignores a drowning victim.
- A wealthy entrepreneur, of sour looks, enjoys a fine meal by the shore, yet wonders why as the tide rolls in he still feels insatiably hungry.
- The drummer in a metal band sees his father’s face in the cowhide, yet each night after the show he still needs ****** to numb the pain.

Pythagoreans thought the universe Eternally Recurs, and we know human life has infinite potential.

If it's true that human lives eternally recur and are filled with infinite potential

Why are we all still in pain?

He lay there in a *****, unkept ball,
Having surrendered to the pavement.
Wisps of stringy brown hair
Covered the lines on his sunken in face,
His yellow smoked eyes, rheumy and blurred,
His vision hazy, like a punch-drunk boxer.

Kathleen Harmon sashayed by
With nary a glace downward.
Once they were equals,
When they sat together
During high school Chemistry.

Time slowed from a Tango to a Waltz,
As a drop of saliva
Kissed the pavement.
Stringing there from his cracked, parted lips.

His tangled brown whiskers,
Patchy on his cheeks,
Had lengthened with the passing days
Since their last meeting with a razor.

Nikes, Prada, and Gucci
Ignore him in passing
All sports, fashion, and business meetings;
On the clock, and self-absorbed.

Dusk marked the sky
With a violet crayon
Worn to a nub,
Then worn to nothing.

A sudden thud startled him awake!
Then blackened hardwood stunned him as it bit into his ribs!
A caustic voice berated his slumber,
A navy blue reminder that even surrender was no escape.

One long endless night passes yet again,
Never mind counting sheep, I’m now counting flocks.
The days blur into dreams of classics...
I am Ahab, and sleep becomes my whale!

Countless twinkling lights mock me through the open window
Judging me from their perch in the night sky above.
I eat another bowl of meaningless carbs,
Hoping the article on my Twitter feed wasn’t just fluff,
I load and reload the harpoon, as I miss my shot time and time again.

I fade again. Woozy now. Eyes slow blinking...
The whale is smiling, it's tail flipping, and mouth all grinning, stabbing teeth. I fire and miss.
He laughs, ignoring this, and drenches me in ****.
He flashes me a toothy grin as he disappears underwater.
He isn't coming back.

My bed becomes a porcupine.
My pillow becomes a stone.
My blanket becomes a sheet of burs woven by the Norns.
My eyelids become coarse-grade sandpaper.
My back becomes a banshee screeching in pain.
My legs become restless deer who sense a nearby wolf.
My hair begins growing perversely inward.
My bladder becomes the Trevi Fountain in Rome.
My thoughts become the last horses running the Triple Crown.
My heart becomes a double bass playing Skeletons of Society.

He appears again, far away from my ship, head turning in the distance, pity on his face.
He turns back toward the open sea and is gone.
I perform a complex horizontal maneuver
That CNN’s Dr. Gupta said soothes "The sleepless body at night".
(He’s a ******* liar!)

The melting white whale becomes a series rectangles above me,
They form a drop ceiling,
With sprayed-on popcorn, and unexplained little holes
That provide me with a giant connect-the-dots ceiling!

WHEN suddenly a shrill, repeating, soul-crushing
Cacophony wracks what little sanity remains within me, trapped in this never-ending, soul-crushing trap of mind-numbing numbidity...

It's that God-forsaken, three-inch square, , ***** capitalist *******-of-a-red-blinking-*******-of-a-heartless-mother telling me it’s time to start a new day...

******* alarm!

I still haven’t finished the last one.

So there we were on the cliff above the railroad tracks, the Missouri River Bridge in the distance. We’d armed ourselves with sticks, rocks, and pellet guns. We were a ragtag militia, all fight and no war.

The roar of the oncoming train drowned out our planning for anarchy and unfocused mayhem.
The five of us waited, unsure how to take best advantage of the rolling brown and yellow Union Pacific. Dan looked at me and wiped the sweat from his face with his *** Pistols t-shirt.

“Let’***** it!” Rob said. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t say no. If I said it was wrong they’d have laughed and done it anyway. Tingles ran down my legs. I leaned against a nearby cedar and craned my head in the direction of the oncoming train. From our vantage point on the bluff amongst the trees, the unwary conductor would never see us. I waved to signal the others as it arrived.

The ground shook as the train roared below us. Deaf from its passing, we used hand signals like the guys in Red Dawn. That’s it! That’s who we were! We were the Wolverines! And I was the scout who had just spotted a resupply train that was carrying logistical necessities like...

“Cars! *******! This one has cars on it,” Kevin yelled. The other soldiers all gathered rocks and threw them at the passing supply train. I yelled “Wolverines!” as they pelted the evil communist convoy. The four of them joined me screaming the same. My blood boiled, and my face went hot as I embraced the guerilla tactics.

I was dumbfounded when Rob picked up a boulder... and lifted it over his head like a weightlifter. As it flew through the air in deliciously slow motion I thought for sure it was just going to drop straight down the face of the crumbling bluff. Then, with accuracy too precise to have been planned, the boulder crashed through the front windshield of some red Ford, and due to the speed of the passing train, blew through the back glass before tumbling to rest on the hood of some blue Chevy below it.

Dead Flippin Silence

“Rob! *******! That was awesome!” someone said...Tim, I think.

Rob stood with fists pumping in the air. He won today, and he became the captain of our squad. I picked up a much smaller rock and threw it, watching as it clanged helplessly off the train’s metal siding. The Russians would surely come looking for us now, and this was a hit and run raid. We bolted from our perches and sought other opportunities to hit the Commies where it hurt!

We really wanted to be Anarchy!