capitulate

The cat comes in soaked in chimney smoke, looking for a lap to lie in. The room is lit poor and laden with dust. From shadow to shadow, from ghost to ghost, the voices drift and fade. Webs strung along the ceiling, cracks whisper their way through the walls. The air is still, all hope is sinking. Words never know the way back. Words never carry the weight.

The sky reaches ever higher, the stars clotted in the greasy night. The world is lights and pavement, the world is asphalt and steel. The cracked sound of every hope as it leaves your lungs, the labor of breath as everything slips away. The words stick to every surface,  they clamber bitter from tooth and tongue. Sounds to spit into the emptiness that spills and spills from within. Noises to make when there is nothing left to say. Letting go a kind of impermeable grief, an icy wind where there once seemed to be a soul.

You can walk from street to street, you can wander from town to town. These wide fields and narrow passes, these hungry valleys and stoic mountains. Door to door, from sea to shining sea, until at last you realize there is nowhere left to go. This sick world just another mirror victimized by your barren eyes. All your grievances and your crimes evidence of the error that is all you are. Inside the confessional of your alien heart there is at last some small truth. Leaving this life the only road left to take.