wrecking ball

After awhile, no-one even asks. After awhile, no-one even bothers. That is what you get when you give away everything you give up. That is what you get when you write it all down just to be done with it. The cities of secrets, the lingering contentment and the spent contingency, the cards misdealt and the hand played through. Join hands and dance the old circle out. Join hands before you all fall down. They all fly away before first light finds you. They all fly before the bridge collapses.

They say it is the way of the world. They say it is all your fault if you won't grow wings. They spit words and crazes, unaware of their loose stitching and rough seams. They speak as though they didn't know how easily it all comes undone. They speak as if the universe can only love them. You know the truth of it, the sharpness of the blade, the weight of every blow. You know the belt and the fist and the worth of so much empty promise. You know that the world isn't known in the wishing or the wanting. The world's will is all break and bloom. Everything ends up gone.

You don't pray for the strength of the girders, you don't hope for the endurance of steel. You don't pause for the sweet sentiment or the wicked guitar. All these bruises and salty kisses. All these blow-hards and do-gooders and dark horses. All these beauties and bravos and beasts. Flesh and bone, mass and velocity, the rain and the sun are the only gods you follow. You have been blessed with the stripping of every last innocence. You live the truth everyone openly ignores, blood and breath, bloom and dust. The bullet and the wrecking ball, that sick insistence of force somehow unabated by all these niceties and blessings. You live where there words can't go, and they will never see you because they cannot confess their complicity. Their blessings only another kind of crime.