Carried: Malocclusion (Dislocation of the lower jaw)

It runs as a thwarted agency, an intense frustration at the inability to manifest oneself and one's own action, a lived sense that circumstance will not allow it. It was set in a grossly overbearing, repressive family whose conditions never permitted self-expression or effective action, so the reaching keeps meeting a wall. The clinical name is a shape, not a diagnosis. What it asks for is one effective action of one's own carried through.

I keep trying to make my own life happen, and it's as if circumstance simply won't have it.

The man at the pool of Bethesda, who waited by the healing water for decades, always beaten to it by another, high and dry at the very edge of his own deliverance. The form implies a task: to be helped into the water one could never reach in time.