roots and branches

The dry pine leans hard into the hot blue sky, severed roots and broken branches. A stifling wind seeps between the fence boards, giving the feeling of a crawling motion to the stripes of sunlight painted in the dust. Sweat holds its convention on my flesh, trickling down my dirty face like unearned tears. It is a sad song rising, thirst and hunger and clinging heat. It is the still air stirring, dancing upon the grave of all tomorrows. The world in an uproar, and I only ever talk about the weather.

It isn't the ache of existence, it isn't the hurt in heart. The sickness endures every fact and intervention when it arises from the hole in my soul. Good days and bad days hardly change stances. The fight is the same, however bright the stars or blue the moon. The difference ends up only in degrees, frying pan pr fire. The world moves on whether you are ready to ride. The world doesn't worry on those that it leaves behind. It tumbles through the heavens, riding what rails it may. It spins and speeds and collides with the debris of creation, any god there is one of cosmic desolation and abrupt extinction. All the pieces might fit, but no horse or soldier can fix them together once they are so sundered.

The wind shifts, stirring leaf and needle. The sky is a fever, the day a feud. Somehow the lack of evidence still incriminates. Somehow pretending hard enough makes it so. All these fits and seizures, the speeches paused to wait on imagined applause. The dull weight presses inside my skull, the words falter while the blood ignites. I creep through the indifference and the trash, bruised and beaten and as comical as can be. The silly onslaught of this relentless poverty, an infection culled by design and neglect. Sorrow only so much shifting sand. Roots dig and branches reach though the tree is already dead. The calendar fills with contradictions, each prediction a mouth full of dust.