diatribe

It’s the rise of smoke towards the overhead fan, it’s the bored shadows sighed by the bare light bulb. It’s the lean against the wall, holding on as you cough your head full of stars, the stitch in the breathing, the pain like a blade in your back. The falling that feels like the ease into dreaming, the fireworks and clatter that turns out to be brains bouncing in bone. Another lapse towards the fading side of the calendar. Another fall alone in the dark. Always failing, forever seeing stars. 

The failure of the frame is a special kind of diatribe, listen here Sonny Jim, time will have its say and its way. The front porch prophets grumbling and grieving their told you sos as the inevitable takes the mic, call and responding across the blur of realms. Here it comes, there it goes, I end in spark and sigh. The anchored chains of the curse woven into the marrow, the cruel lance of time cleaving the strength from the flesh. You take a knee, you hit the floor. There is no noble dying. 

To rage unto the flesh and the feeling, to put it to every breath. To sing these furies and ecstasies out of this blood and haunting. To rise again and wrestle the moment from its feet, to hold on to something by bone and ghost, the press of the will an alarm and a beckoning. Eternity goes on and on: it’s important to hydrate. I take a long slow swallow of icy water. There’s a wish for your kiss, a sigh, and the laden ache that passes for how the time passes without you. I crack my neck and take another smoke.