inert

The flame separates the stick of incense from its soul, smoke curling upwards for a few laps before departing on the ferocious winds. The dull intention and the empty heavens torn silk before the exhausted earth and boundless sky turns again to extra words and clumsy embellishments. The feel of the fool’s nipped heel the whole of my identity, a tattered spectacle, hapless and chained to this decay. The mind exuded from the meat, thinking it is the exception rather than the rule. Like the tree cursing the sun and the soil for the limitations of its roots and limbs. Haughty stardust bleating and bleeding and shitting itself to death.

Once you slip loose from the story, the gravity of your interactions lose their abstractions and alibis. You keep mouthing off and counting cards, knowing each choice is futile, but you got to have something to do. Gone are all the old compañeros, ascended or descending or dead. Gone are all the equivocations now that the invitations ran dry. Like smoke, like shadows, like footprints beneath the rising tide. The world is not the earth, the wants are not the needs, the paths all dead ends or stations of the wheel. This recursive urge to say it out loud endures, to speak the same phrases again and again, like there will be a sudden outbreak of listening. 

The sun just keeps rambling on, westering on its way, throwing shade into the street. The shadows roil and shift, as if awaiting their transformation into their final form. Hints of jinn and angels, the host coiled just on the other side of veil, waiting to seize the loose parts of the mind and manifest. It suggests the unknown terrors that would visit me from the darkness of my opened closet as a child, with demons fashioned from old fashioned movie monsters and the enemies rallied against Scooby-Doo. Waking to my name whispered, body frozen in fear, choking on my attempts to call for help. I never knew that I would unbecome, a shapeless shiftless shambles, seizing hearts and embraced as the object of the torch and pitchfork set. I never knew that I would lose my place in the world, volatile but ultimately ephemeral. Furiously spinning my wheels as the earth consumed me. Smoke rising because there’s nothing to hold it  down.