Have you ever noticed, footsteps are like heartbeats?
In the vastness of the tent, they can be slow and purposeful. They can swift, they can skip or they can stumble and stagger.
Sometimes, one's feet will move in a dance that is confident and strong. Sometimes, you can barely hear them at all. Uncertain movements, frozen in fear, until ropes of flesh and sinew can move no more. Stiff and falling are the legs for whom the heart burns no more.
They like to tell you, why is a raven like a writing desk?
But they're asking the wrong question. Already caught in the waves of entertainment, blinded by their laughing and folly.
When is the circus more than just the tent - and when is the tent more than just a tent? Everything else may as well be the mouth, the hands, the legs. Solid ground before you step into the nest.
Do not believe what the bright, circling lights show you.
This ring is a stomach.
Those seats, the teeth.
And I, stepping across the web - the tongue.
Called through the lips of the tent, I am the preparation before the inevitable swallow. So distracted by the act and the song, so few notice the feet.
You will never see how they shake, taut with tension. Every step, measured and careful. Because should a single twitch not be accounted for, the belly of the beast stirs too early. Mistakes are only ever tolerated once, or why else would we call them mistakes?
Have you ever bit your tongue on accident?
Worse still, should you bite your tongue on purpose. Again and again, teeth digging in and seats crashing all around you, till the mouth fills with blood and the stage is drowning, tongue, teeth and all.
Across the thin, beating string, every heartbeat sounding like thunder through the feet. Step so carefully, one pattern to the next through the breathing tent. Only one slip, and you'll drown just like everyone else.
Humans swallow their tongues, their likely to meet their final curtain call. But should the circus swallow the tongue, it will writhe in the acid, burning down to the bones. When there is almost nothing left, the tongue will be spat out to be ready once more. Better than before.
Once again, ready for the taste of despair before the final savouring.
Do you feel the floor beneath your feet breathing?
Eyes bigger than the stomach are everywhere.
Can you feel it?
Step, step, ba-dump. Step, step, ba-dump.
It is with me. It is in me.
It is everywhere.
