dead skin

Pain is never the lesson, though it tends to teach those it doesn't impede or destroy. The tensions in the atmosphere render changes in those of us made of transitive matter, energy added to the system, the back-masked track of living becoming so much strained sensation. Skin cracked by the whispered secrets of the unbound wind, nerves exposed and flayed by the world they can not ignore. The electric tongue of so much touch, condensed into these alarming stings and warning sirens. These fingers that feel unreal, honest substitutes for the ones lost long ago.

The fist made slowly, seeming to spark and crackle with the fire it has learned to contain. Somewhere blue plumes jet out and sear this pantomime of human grasp, this manifestation of other sources and distant heat. Somewhere the flesh cooks just from being held so closely to the center of so much want. The inferno earned through ache and toil, the burden of any true power the crisp insistence of the work needed to maintain it. This pain that is the song of living, the music of all the gaps and the extinctions that continuity has chosen to endure.

So the sun settles its debts. It breaches the gulf between day and night, sinking into another dawn just around the corner. Sinking away from these dreams and promises. Flesh and bone and blood remember. The stretched limbs and the yearning blossoms remember. The sunken ship, the bloated well, the action that endures after other actions have made possible what once was but a notion. The wind laps at the open hand, some cells extinguished because a system of endless limits had to close a door to open this hole in the universe. The conflagration of conversions, the prayer meant to transform crime into feast. The steady enduring ache of being here, enduring despite the primacy of change. Every wisdom ending in only questions, birthing dead air.