the red line writ

I am mostly still through these days of travel, mostly silent in these crowded and celebratory days. My fingers sting from the cold dry air and the mischievous ink, cracked and rough and numb of the finer tense of touch. Icy fog parting slightly for bright and blinking lights, a chilled rain pattering upon windows and roofs. The closer some truths come, the further the living gets from the facts. The humble boil of this reckless blood, slowly toiling away at these varied wounds. The sickened call of distance, the aimless prisons we call homes.

These are old wars, slight discrepancies between measures, conflicts over the propriety of the ratio of portions. Ten thousand tipping points into failures that seem like glory, a handful of hobbling paths that lead to that resolution of greatest goods, seeming like ambivalence and loss. Stupidity is blessed in the absence of self-reflection, cleverness hobbled by the line check and the mirror. Simple wisdom and capacious foolishness our only hope. The days I have burned, tentatively on the mend. The nights I have scoured, in glee and excess. The balance only works itself out in a scale of years, those wasted and those looming in the shadows of tomorrow's tomorrow. These garbled poems have weaponized my shrift of wit, every admission an omission of perilous intent, of fabricated honor in the face of work-a-day duty. Nearly a year of incapacity have whetted my edge, and claimed a direction for my aim.

Our oldest stories are of invention and of wander. Claiming lands lost to our distant kin, honing our vengeance upon the stony road, slaying our hidden fathers over the right of way. The sagas tell of threats and of journeys, of the necessity of strangers and of the sanctity of blood freed from the servitude to the flesh. Gods and ghosts make up map and motive, beasts and birds strange alliances. We are the maps, we are the stories. The sins and the gifts of the oldest glimmering revenant arrive in our dreams to guide and deceive us. Tricks and treats indistinguishable at this point in our endless sojourn, we imprint our hearth and our exodus upon the surface of every day. I rest, as stones rest beneath the river. I wander, as the river does, blanketing a bed of silt and stone. The change is upon me, another day settles in, ready to be the last.