Tuesday, September 12, 2023

9 mile cigarette

There’s not much to do once the sinking sets in, once you feel the collapse throughout the collateral, the drag of the earth’s core gripping at your depths. Even the loosed sigh holds on as it descends, the inevitable pull, the winged fall. It’s going and going and then it’s gone. This likely isn’t news to more than a few of you. You fly, you fight, you sit tight and smoke in the corner. Down to me and the dreams I don’t remember, down to me and the mystery unresolvably irreconcilable. Then ashes and dirt and the long look away.


The repetitions and the echoes, the memories etched into the dreaming and the husk, the tapping of happenstance upon this fated skull long enough for a pin drop, a name around this who and here and now. Even with this hole worn through the world coming out the wound in the bottom of my right foot I act as though I can maybe still walk it off. Living is another set of superstitions knotted up in the continuity, stories despite all the missteps and the mysteries, each path inevitable while you’re on it. Not as bad, but plenty worse I began to pace the statuary. Out of initiative and means of egress. 


Curled up here with my stubborn wounds and worn mementos, I take another moment to fill in the blanks. There’s no lore I hold from the unseen shore, no power I am beholding to, no faith to rub my nose in. No stake in heavens or hells, no deadworlds to awake to, no cigarette to smoke that’s 9 miles long. Holed up to tell what doesn’t show, I wait and set down a verse or two, knowing mostly futility. Here I go, empty handed before apathy and enmity, leaving words in my wake. Only time going by and the implacable fist of gravity, pacing the boards by the glow of the ghost light, anxious for the end.

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