the chain

We don’t always wake to the world around us. Sometimes there’s a returning to the flesh, an exchange of essences and understandings before the real begins to ink itself in, the names and numbers and the miles to go. Poet or butterfly by the by, we wake with claims and answers, our forms trading, our intentions amok. From the known derivations to the concessions to the lexicon in hand, we turn and we imbue this terrible engine of carnal imperative. The briefest inkling to breakfast sandwich, we gather slow and act fast. We extrude meaning from the wake of our rampages, we craft the language we get you with. Amid the seas of chain, these links. 

It’s the sort of there that isn’t there. The offering to this imagined location, all the heart and mind and soul, my Mecca or the moon somehow only the formal. The chastisement of the stays and annulments, the long odds and my pitiable condition, this wish to exist again that will not be fulfilled. The longing still there, a world where the words were allowed to work, a hand to hold and a play to back. Simple unsettled desires to nettle at as the duty overwhelms. Someone singing softly, a hand brushing back long hair. The door moved on to other, less hollow lives. 

This is the letter I write each day, the lumps of sluggish dull ego, the drift of the wind through my long dead bones. Singed out and sung loud and smeared with ash. The wearying treatise of self’s sad journey. This is the chain written out of some surly burdensome impulse, the writ of ritual and the power of the spoken. Better read than dead, though this doesn’t always track. I sit as the winds come running to my lap, the sunset like it’s waiting for an encore. Bound to the bonds of ache and oath, I return again to the hungry fold of tongue and teeth, tasting the bent of your name. I breathe in again.