Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…
There is a juggler just down the boardwalk there and he has been doing it for six months or so now. Every day. Every day adding a new item: bowling ball, helium balloon, toaster, ping pong ball.
How he keeps these things in motion. Always just one in the hand, the others in the air. How he keeps the birds above entertained, and the sandal-and-sock-wearing drunk old men, coming out of the casinos, so very enthralled.
At night, when the juggler is home alone, in his attic appartment overlooking the alley where they filmed those fight scenes in Barfly, he sometimes dreams in an Irish accent of drunken perambulations around another city, another time.
His hands finally rest. His arms can luxuriate in cotton, and springs, and sleep.
He dreams of a girl distant and lost now, that once meant something to him, but he can’t remember what, can’t fully remember her. Not a mother, or a lover, just a girl, and a footprint, and a gale blowing up the face of a cliff.
He dreams Hollywood car crash scenes on the rocks below. Or Holden standing there catching VW Squarebacks full of grade-school children.
You would think his muscle memory would be such that even in his sleep he would juggle, but every day it is like learning it all over again. Learning the tricks, how to work the stilts, where to hide the canary. What is the sound of one hand clapping? Where do the ducks go when the lake freezes over? What if instead of keeping them all in the air, he lets them all fall to the ground?
The crowd will disband. There will be no tip. Rent will be hard this month. Things will be broken.
What if all fall to the ground but that weathered baseball from childhood? What if that’s the one he catches as the bowling balls, and beanbags, and World Book Encyclopedias, and diamond rings all fall and shatter or thud? What if, better yet, he throws all of these into the ocean, except the baseball? Never the baseball.
Would the center then hold?
He could sleep for days with it under his pillow, as the drunks and hookers and lights take over the night.