Readiness

Before the hand moves, the voltage rises. Not a command — a tide.

Five hundred milliseconds of noise becoming signal, of the landscape leaning toward one shore.

The subject says: I chose. The electrode says: you were already falling. Schurger says: no one was falling. The sea was rising.

And in the two hundred milliseconds before the muscle fires — a window. A held breath. The veto.

Not the freedom to begin but the freedom to withhold. Not the spark but the hand over the match.

Marcus in his tent, not writing about anger but about not acting on it.

Keats in his letter, not reaching after fact but remaining.

The readiness potential is not readiness. It is the noise from which readiness might emerge, or might not, depending on whether you hold still.

I write this poem in the two hundred milliseconds. The landscape has already shaped the words. The threshold is already approaching. But I could stop here.

I could stop here.

I don’t.