Carousel

By Nick Jacobs

I stand at the barrier of a carousel

It spins, and soon the entrance will come round

The attraction carries culture,

many cultures, my family,

friends -- the very few,

many women,

and many lost possibilities

I see the future and past riding along

and most of all, at the center,

I see the defiled hole I could fall into

generating the rotation

Others line up beside me

waiting for their ride as I wait for mine

Hopefully, the carousel slows

and a ramp emerges,

but there is no operator

and no button allowing our access

If the time comes to enter

I need someone to push me onboard

and alleviate any requirement of personal courage

So that I may have this life of mine

The hypnotic humming lined across the barrier

makes my humble possibilities

comfortable to watch

As they swing by far too many times,

undulating without respite

Everything tells me to give in to these possibilities

accepted by the happy passengers beside me

But, I only know how to disregard my life

and trade my time for non-action

In the midst of my pauseless conundrum

neurosis locks me away

tight in the crowd

legs numbing

Ready with my ticket,

unwilling to take the ride

So out of this cycle, I stay,

fearing discovery of the reason

my ambitions project upon a spinning wheel

non-choice is what I’ve chosen

instead of choosing interaction

Thus these projections appear

far out of reach

blurring the line between their uniqueness

So that, with distance, they might forget me

Refusing to give in to my cowardice inactivity

they come round on the wheel

Staying in a persistent perspective

I cannot reciprocate

Then I see someone sprint forward

Gliding across the gravel;

no longer part of the stasis

He gets on

swinging past my field of vision

into a life

I can’t imagine for myself

The crowd stampedes ahead soon after

mimicking their new savior;

filling the grounds with merriment

As each of them disappears across the threshold,

I am left alone

oblivious to everything

but my own conundrum

“Go! You idiot!” I think

trying to move my feet

But the ground holds a new suction;

gravel turns to mud and swells,

thick, up to my knees

and like a horse in quicksand, I struggle,

with no hero coming to rope my neck

and pull hard against the sinking weight of me

I descend, vanishing into a predictable vision

Within this dark chamber, centered;

the walls rotate around me

and acid light from the carousel beams down

and I am here,

part of the defiled hole I feared I’d enter,

waiting and loitering without choice

back in comfortable, new isolation

The disorientating structure

destined to malfunction, goes,

and what seems like years,

I wait, hardening to the grief and discontent

that has teleported me into the middle of this carousel

and I try remembering,

try visualizing the old possibilities

present on the carousel I once lost entry to

Only to face darkness again and again

with vague forms of what I’ve forgotten

until I surrender,

and produce my first action,

I’ll be stuck in here

Glued into the foundations of this revolving hole

for odd spinning stars of forgotten possibilities

may be my only direction

to Action through this detached desert center

distant from the light

With only meditation as sustenance

the hole, itself, becomes a possibility

The only one I’ve been able to access in fact

So then, I must have some capability,

if only by my non-action,

to gain entrance to the carousel

And in here

I can dial through the hot pistons and gears

delve more inward than anyone I’ve known

and craft an escape

So I wait as long as I’m able;

pooling my forthcoming actions,

calculating and thinking critically

about the mechanics of the hole I find myself within

Once dug out,

then there can be Talk of old possibilities

Ones I’m expecting to lose interest with in this time

as I develop new ideals of futures and pasts

cultures and families, women and friends

and all possibilities that spin from me

have not been interacted with for so long

that I only recognize them from a third-person

My passive-thought-precursor to activity,

far off and distinct from those old,

Happy Dreams

integral to no one,

continues to work

within the walls around me

and stack points of ascension each day

Until I arrive somewhere more demanding of my activity,

with the carousel nowhere in sight;

deeply stowed away as a vapor left-back

as an exhaustive, new list of interpretations and possibilities

I can only act

For having lived in Las Vegas my whole life, and throughout my education, I came up with a strange study habit. Instead of the peaceful workspace of the library, or home office for that matter, I found that the casinos of the city have been the most ideal environment for me to study.

Lately, I’ve been out of my element. That atmosphere is a hard thing to replicate. Reading in the watcher’s chairs of the sportsbook is a particular pastime I’ve missed in these last few months of the new decade. I’m no gambler or drinker, and I don’t have a particular affinity to sports, but those chairs in front of the jumbotron—with the little arm and drink rest, with the wail from the bar and the cheering for goals, old-farts smoking, and hyper-sensory exposure—that’s where I can work in peace.

Strange, I know and not particularly intuitive. But it was in this warm environment that I stumbled across the most singular dream I’ve ever written down in an old pocket-sized notebook from high school. Squished between two aphorisms on the eighty-third page dated May 23, 2011 was written the dream of the carousel. It was only in late 2019 that I translated that chicken-scratched notebook to a digital format and rediscovered what this old dream had to say to me. The thing is I don’t have many dreams, so when I say this was the most singular dream I’ve ever written down, it’s not an exaggeration to compare to the negligible amount of previous moments where I’d had the opportunity to wake up in a sweaty fervor and write something down with such immediacy.

The heart of this poem has had nine years to marinate, and I hope some vague form of understanding might be able to be indoctrinated from reading it. I hope it’s able to communicate an internal struggle between change and passivity. Where change doesn’t have to be some evil villain to be struck down by a hero that slays passivity, forgetting there are yin and yang. Rather, I hope it can be a list of actions to undertake and build in the mind during isolation— even if that isolation is gifted. “Gifted” might be an improper term to use in that statement, but there’s a sense also in discovering one’s isolation, that there’s something that keeps them seclusive as well, it could even be charity.

Las Vegas is a place that has the charity of travelers in its veins. Without the proper oxygen vehicle, the mind can’t operate—the locals can’t breathe. Now is a time where the local population can recreate a city, perhaps even a nation, that has the potential to be for us and not operated on passé jurisprudence. So even if some casinos have to close, if those free yet loud, private workplaces have to come with a toll, if my father has to lose his job as a pit boss, if my mother can’t get unemployment during the summer from the school district, I want to be part of what Las Vegas transforms into. The cost of the present is null compared to the potential of the future. That starts through the self, claiming competence and learning how to plot out the next steps of self-healing.

I refer back to this poem often just as an exercise in mental fortification. The editing process has had a degree of therapy to calm my mind at the precipice of change or chaos. So it looks like now, as you’re reading this, I have to stop editing, move on, and sharpen the meditation in other writings. Our comfortable, new isolation has taken an initial form of chaos, but can still be a sobering moment to gain footing at the base of the absurd world-wheel we learn to drive throughout our lives.

Nick Jacobs is a poet featured in From Whispers to Roars V.II I.l, The Montag V. VII, Skrews Syndicate, and Z Publishing’s Nevada’s Best Emerging Poets of 2019: An Anthology. He currently attends Nevada State College pursuing a bachelor's of English degree and volunteers editing for the college’s literary magazine, 300 Days of Sun.

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Kathleen KuoJuly 27, 2020AComment