want

The heart is a hard road roamed, where hope is sent to loom and fade, where the word is sent to show the way. The heart is a bleak spell owned, the cracks left of your character, the shadows left of walls. The beat will stretch the skin awhile, the rhythm will hold the hallway open. Through bad dreams and drowsy pitch, these blind eyes urge you on. It unfolds like a fortune from a cookie. It tastes of the pastry ground down from so much must. The sensed hand just the weight of a drizzling rain.

The clock that once held me fast to the classroom now never seems to even want to meet my gaze, hands blur past the hard-count face on the wall, hours bleeding into the very air.  The dismal tic, the doleful tock, the aching mechanics of time as it abandons. The lights carve my shape from the darkness, my shadow clambering across the floors and up the walls. Each breath spent to wish and want, ambition another words for haunted, initiative either the hunt of hunger or the fear of being devoured. A spell cast like lines in the sea.

The heart paces the halls, the heart beats the boards. The show is still the show, whatever words you pin to its tail. All this want, all this wander, fingers feeling the brickwork and the rigor of the mortar. All the need that pulls and presses just the blind discovery of each joint and seam, our lives the simple texture of the surfaces we conspire. This meat so full of starlight and magic, the shine and spark collide in our sovereign flesh. This world of chain and asphalt binds us to our last rasping breath. Make a wish, snuff the candles. Make a wish, listen as the heart gutters and growls. The heart hungers and plods, the world always right here out of reach.