You possess a body trained and disciplined through the multitude of hours of the multitude of days of the years and years and years in which you exercised and practiced to develop your special, oh-so-special, oh-so-wondrous fusion of athletic power and artistic grace.

You stand on skates as gracefully and naturally as if they grew out of your feet as bone and flesh made of metal and leather. Moving across a plain of thick ice you are vibrantly alive, your strength and confidence pulsating in every cell. The synapses of your brain are habituated to transmit movements of perfected grace from your skeleton outward through your nerve and muscle fibers and skin.

Surrounded by concentric circles of spectators, you perform as their slave and their god and their king. Looking at you are thousands upon thousands of universes built of flesh: their eyes are cameras daring to stare into you as if staring into the sun.

Gazing at you, the carefully, diligently sculpted athlete-artist that is you, their eyes follow with mesmerized wonder your every movement. Loving you, they savor the skin-tight costume of brightest oceanic blue with boisterously blood red trim that hugs and protects even as it exposes your fiercely toned musculature. Loving you, the audience of endless human universes is delightfully dazzled by your glittering array of silver sequins and flaunted beads that are as white as the ice as white as bone as white as the purity of your soul.

You move confidently and skillfully over the beautiful precious wondrous floor of solid ice that is your element, your sacred beloved element, as in your glory you move and glide and jump and swirl with perfect prowess.

Thesis

Your expertly trained mind automatically and instantly paints a familiar thick pale blue blurred circle around the rink. You see the thick pale blue blurred circle and only the thick pale blue blurred circle as you spin with awesome and divine swiftness.

    You are

        spinning

            spinning

                spinning

                    spinning

as concentric universes of humanity gaze at you, enslaved to you, loving you, owning you,

you who see only the thick pale blue blurred circle that your mind has painted.

    You who

        pull your body miraculously inward

            a pinpoint

                a pinprick

                    a planet.

Then like a rose instantly blossoming you spread yourself back out and you glide and flow brilliantly across the world of ice that is your trusted world.

Then suddenly you jump!

JUMP!

You land perfectly, solidly, cleanly, and you spread your arms and bask in the glory of the clapping, the endless clapping of approval and admiration that is so deserved.

You allow yourself to be loved by the clapping of all those enthralled by you

only by you

completely by you

by the perfect graceful athletic strength and beauty

that is you.

Antithesis

Gliding over the ice, you are a vision of strength and glamour, your talent displayed to all the world as you make a mighty leap and –

a skate catches, gives way, you trip –

No! No!

No!
But it happens, you do it, you do it, you do it!

You trip

and you fall

into pain,

into disgrace,

and the multitudes of eyes bore through you with the fire of your shame, their collective and overlapping gasps like waves of fire fierce enough to melt the solid floor of ice.

Mocking laughter tears through you, torturing you, exposing you as a fraud, a failure, and you are dying,

                                                    endlessly dying

but you cannot die you cannot escape the horror of your failure, cannot stop the jeers of those you have so terribly dreadfully disappointed, you are naked in your disgrace, you want to die but cannot die, you cannot end the degradation that tortures you and surrounds you and traps you forever.

Synthesis

You leap beautifully into the air but when you land

you wobble – No! No! –

        -- wobble --

        Your landing unclean, unclean, and

you hear gasps and your heart threatens to tear viciously through your chest –

but you do not fall.

YOU DO NOT FALL!

You recover quickly, you recover, you do not fall, you do not fail, you recover and you skate confidently and beautifully and keep skating, skating, skating, skating in the excitement of your singular artistic ecstasy, your performance sparkling like the silver sequins and white beads that shimmer and flutter from your shirt. You glide with surety and also with passion, a passion so great it erases everything that is not you and the ice and the endless human universes who watch you, mesmerized, enchanted, and transfixed by you.

You move with grace and

        love and

        pride and the

        humility of serving the audience that loves you, that must love you as you

turn and twist across the chilly white plain that is your birthright, that was built and exists to display your beautiful glamorous muscular perfected skills.

When you take your bow you feel the thunderous clapping of the thousands upon thousands of universes made flesh who came to see you, to worship you, to love you, and to be served by you, by the wonderful exotic everyday miracle that is you

For

    You

    Are

        The Man of the Ice.