the inheritance

This speed of loss that keeps increasing becomes the only measure. The falling, the failing, the muttered wishes and empty promises. The things we shed, compressed against that whisper thin wall of now. The momentum of a life seems to much at these moments, all the ache and alone bright and vibrant, all this lack flavored of ash, tinting the lips. The cycle is a shudder, a spasm, a few misfiring synapses, and the world snaps in two just as you thought you gathered enough to hold on to. Then everything is freefall, that flight towards critical mass. All these charts and obligations left incomplete eating a hole in your heart.

This is what it is to hurtle through the black mass of wormed thought, the sorry work of cyclothymia, the inevitable plummeting from counting on these waxen wings. This is what it is to feel the barrel, caress the mirthless blade. Day after day to reel, this tumble, this wreck, this storm. All sense dissolved beneath the stymied tongue, all songs lie dashed with hope on the floor. To wear the dark certainty, to be this husk owed only extinction. The truth is there is no bottom.

So the fingers spill over tides of plastic symbols, speech reduced to cyphers and remnants. The heart stalls, beat again and again against this stone you swallowed. There are no stars, no words, no moments left. This is the inheritance, that last cold hard slap across your face. Wait too long, and there are only these ashes left to light the final embers. Wait long enough and all answers because afterthought, only this falling confused with flight, this flight mistook for purpose. This lapse is the last thing you are allowed to feel, and it will outlive these tracks you made, like boots salvaged from the feet of murder. It will endure, this hole in the world only noticed after all you can do is fall.