the workings of the worm

It stares with the gravitas of ancient bronze, attuned to the sound of furtive shadows blooming beneath the bluster of early stars. It waits just around the corner, it slips off its shoes, knowing your plans and intentions. These days the nights seem to all bunch up at one end, huddled with the angle, obeying the inevitable sloping down. These days it is watching even when it forgets to own any particular eyes. It is hard to contend with the roll and stot of tomorrow when all your weakness makes it hunt you that much harder.

I sit here, leaning into this freshest empty, a still and wilted Friday after a week of sweat and dirt and labor. Scraped up, bruised, and bitten I sit, still too tired to shower. My flesh feels as if it wants to crawl straight off my bones. My skin crackles with each flex and stretch, every fist and finger. My skin radiates, simmering in the sunlight that just will not leave. Once there were a retinue of tomorrows, waiting to attend to me. Now each new one seems to be daring me to cross over that scraped sand line. Now it is hard to tell if I can take them even one at a time.

It was a day of flowers and splinters. It was a day of ache and longing and the comfort of knowing your limits. Startling colors and humbling weights. Out among the rough tangled endings, out here in the bluff splendor of life moving on, I do not seem to learn. Tomorrow's attentions are nothing like love. It is the affection of the plow upon the workings of the worm. It is the blind corner and the blessings of the cliff.