the sort of things you’d think you’d say

Beating uneasily my heart slips over the edges of the bowl, a steak plated to impress blood red over bone white, oh the savor, oh the sacrifice. The night is alive with appetites, a wet winter loosing a river of green fiber and stolid chitin, life ever striving to take a slice. This long losing over at long last not meaning there’s not more losing left, the transition from kin to decedent, the curtains drawn and secrets kept. I sit exposed to local gawkers and famished mosquitoes, meant for another round of sharp passes and easy pickings, grave punctuation hazily in wait as the night drags on and the days flee like roaches caught beneath the unforgiving gaze of kitchen light. You’d think the words would’ve worked their way out. You’d think the years would’ve gotten their lesson through.

It’s mostly gone, all the ways the words might have gone better. It’s all done, these ways I would’ve wanted it to go. There’s always a fuse waiting to burn faster, there’s always a tire ready to blow. There’s just rooms full of boxes and stories that no one knows, places to wake and drowse in, moments to shock and to shame. There’s the knowing that the only people you spoke with for years had turned you off ages ago, strangers by birth and association. The flesh turns cold then the ghost is gone, a fury lashing out for hours, a parcel waiting pick up in the full on empty. We all grieve and continue attending to our stations. We all get the comfort we’ve earned, alone in the big cold world.

So much for what I should have done. So much for what I’d do instead. The dead are the dead, well past caring and tenses. The fate we face, the fate we make, the hank of hair that gives us our uncanny powers shorn by way of exposition. Sisyphean years to grind us down to the nothing much we were always taken for, tanking against time for all our never nevers, promised paradise on the other side of a tomorrow that never comes. Burned to the soul, singed through meat and marrow, I fail and fail. My worth among the ruins and relics all sin wages and the exchange rate of ashes. The radio playing from another room, chatter and static from some distant memory of night in this hollowed house. The last light on at last is dowsed without a word or way to settle these hoards and debts.