wisteria

Open wounds and empty arms all the valentines you’ll find among the offerings once fate finds out where you’re holed up, sometimes guns blazing, sometimes with serpent’s venom tippled in your ear. Always a reminder you’re not the hero or much of a villain, just another point in the plot, just something that goes bump in the night. Nights that once were scented with honey suckle and wisteria now bloom with the funk of dead blood as the cold cold moon gives nothing away. This too long life now a romance with the dust, bad medicine and spilled salt. Your face another fever dream, a montage of memories, bitter and dull with the obligatory damnation.

You wake pursued by odd notions and strange images, nothing but low impact nightmares and high concept jokes. You try not to engage the inevitable slings and arrows, the sticks and stones of this life alone measured in silence and desperation, minus the occasional groan and loose epithet. Back aching against the wall they feint and fall, the unseen hordes and the useless host only there to jeer and foment some hapless fools to the mortal ends they fear. The world won’t let you go while there’re still oceans of contempt left to loose. There’s nothing too terrible, nothing much good, just the relentless tide returning to offer injury for every insult spat.

There are moments where it seemed things could have gone differently, paths untaken and doors that remained shut. You forget it would have still been you there fucking up the road less traveled. The shreds and ribbons from just being yourself. Those long ago nights of an ancient spent summer, floral notes and the roar of the crashing ocean, are little more than mirage and revision. It’s these nights that plod and malinger that reveal your truths, stars no longer visible and spiders camping in the corners. You will sleep some, you will endure your day. No dream worth living, you live on in the lies of others. Some plot trips along, the illness you foment all yours.