automatic for no people

Sometimes the writing on the wall is so clear and bold that it doesn’t need to be written at all. It makes the voyage from hunch to grudge, crosses the hinterlands between the big wild world and the mayhem of the map in your mind. All it once it joins the story that you carry. It becomes part of the passed along. Everyone reads it though it isn’t really there. This is how the story goes, when it goes like that.

The night rolls right off the rails, the stars still so impossibly far, the racket as the moon retreats. The words accumulate as the entity burns, this unfathomable candle, this flame adjacent abundance. It spits and gibbers these disgorged coordinates, the ten thousand expirations and the exaltations of the flesh. I have played my hand and had my shot. Now I’m left with time and the misbegot. Now I’m the sound of the stylus at the end of the disc. Wires cross, I throw sparks and crackle static. The story keeps going even after it’s over.

We are lost in the shine of the lonely lamp. We are weeping orphans drowned out by the drone of the bathroom fan. I hack and heave until the spirit leaves. Each breath a rasp, a wound in the tide, the clutch of the blood slipping a little looser every day. The sky and earth as their children tumble down the pit. The words left as evidence to this terrible conflagration, a too long life wasted writing on the walls of this endless maze. All our pretty pictures painted looking to escape the cage.