strange currencies

The reciprocal moment-- where the rope between the fingers imagines it is the rope at the throat, and there is that gasp, that struggle, and something is still there, aching to be saved-- that is the depth of life, in ends and means. That curdled smoke, those bleeding eyes, the horror that compounds with each thought, the fresh hell that blooms in each notion, this is the wage. When comfort is lost, and the crying doesn't cease, and the work you believed was your reason has been emptied inside out, that worm turning in ways that serve to chill you to the bone, this is where your service begins. The duty that fails your definition of self that you clung to, the duty that could be bore by needle, rock, or blade, is all that is left to guide you to heaven.

This is where the die is cast, where the coin is tossed-- some clattering of bones, some gnashing of teeth later, and we are in the moment contingency provides. No amount of planning, no amount of prayer can alter that which was, though is melts away in the second it takes to say. All our remaindered days, bound in silk and skins, inked with promise and prophecy, full of word after word without meaning or cure. Just another dose of poison to burn through the blood. Just the rot of hesitance taking matters out of our shaking hands.

I couldn't cross the threshold, just as I could never jump the broom. Every turn wrong, and now the hands are empty save from a last small necessary work. Abandoned in all but the obvious dimensions, the price is unfathomably dear while the cost infinitely cheaper than the light spent counting it. The things measured by the handful so much more than the numbers that swarm to show us force and multitudes. That flat flavor of smoke, the bristles of a stretch of rope, and the silky flow of breath, rising and falling in this symphony of dying meat and riddled spirits. The dismal errand still at hand, I watch as my shoulders cast shadows away from another willful sun. I close my eyes, the world anchored as it must be for all the work it is owed.