middle

There is a weariness that comes with being, the arduous descent into the mystery sounding out as pop and grind, the grunt and huff driven from the chakra linkage as I go about getting up. All duct tape and expletives, I simulate the forms. Burn it down before the fade away, spit blaspheme and hyperbole until the words split their seems. This isn’t prayer it’s the bones of the code. This isn’t poetry, it is a counterinsurgency of the antecedent. The stubborn streak of heat and hunger. The naked tongue from root to seed. Every cell aggrieved and spitting sparks.

I can’t say I know what time it is, though I’m always watching some clock. Doing time in every skin I shed. Staring out over the heads of the here and now. Reading about the moment in the trades. All these years of rolling stones and walking in place counted in reflected gazes and inadvertent words. Cookies full of blank fortunes. Salt spilled in little constellations on the table where you are waiting still.

It isn’t the rush of leaving, the goodbye tears tempered with the ascendant departure, the press of bodies moving objects, the discarding of fluids belts and footwear. The strange rituals of escape won’t meet us halfway. It’s not the grace of arrival, existence again contracting to roads and streets and unremarkable domiciles. A room, a bed, a someone waiting to hold. It is the head leaned against the awkward window, the stranger bucking at your back. The place between stories. The middle that barely leaves a mark.