cling

The world falls down in familiar colors, flashes of blue amid the midnight black. The watches are all wound too tight. Bent springs and tiny gear plates, these anachronistic thoughts of machinery at work in my obsolete mind and staggered heart. I weep a little now and again as if to prove I can. My clockwork though is running down, and I fear it won't be long. My flesh in such disrepair, my thoughts a slaughterhouse-- my life dwindles as the self seeps into the soil. Too much fails and the ghost considers burning down this haunted house.

I lived life as a fool and a coward, of no importance and little use. Now as I lose both mind and matter there is nowhere left to turn. I fiddle while the city burned down around my ears, and can only hold myself to blame for choking on all this smoke and tears. My bones and blood are turned to dust, my mind lost in the labyrinth of my busted brain, each day ever a little less. No medicine or doctor seem to be with-in my fading grasp. Suicide seems all that is prescribed to contain the damage of the farce inside my frame.

It is late, and the winds are on the rise. The streetlights drone on, flickering in the distance, the modern constellations of these bled out lives. All the stars forgot me before I was ever born, reaching out with their unfathomably ancient lights. I linger out beneath the leaning pines and indistinct reasons, my riotous mood at last nearly spent. I am the spark of extinguished fires, the unspoken conversations scratched  out in glyph and sign. The sigil of failed punctuation, the borderline where language becomes mistake. Death another door with optimistic locks, not one thing is mine. Everything taken all at once, not even my life my own.