maybe the moral

Maybe it’s the seeds, maybe it’s the soil, maybe it’s the karmic burden, maybe it’s the mortal coil. It’s there in the data if you know how to look. It’s there in the story provided you don’t listen too close. One disaster begets the next, the problems that go unsolved are passed down to progeny and the general inheritors of the shitshow so far, a life looks like a series of perfected mistakes in the lengthening light. Once I thought I was meant to mitigate other people’s grave errors, hold the place of the missing person, hold the line despite. Now I think we just make ourselves useful once in a while whatever it is we meant. I guess that’s the lesson. You probably do some good however badly you constantly fuck up. Maybe not, how should I know? Maybe the moral comes as part of the upgrade. 

Mostly it’s been the old sow and reap. The deep reserves of what else did you expect. The days you do and the days you don’t ebb and flow, until it is only this island with the tide out. The shimmering wasteland surrounded by a sea as yet unmet. Salt and rust reclaiming every self you ever met. Just ink dark nights and the blazing sun beating down, a fever dream scribbled as you feed one hunger to another. The shrug of celebration, the plodding doddle of survival. The falling sky and the missing kisses. The last day feeling the only thing that lasts.

So the pit bull rolls around in the sun. So the coffee cup sits empty. The rosie always ringed around, the ashes all fall down. What gathers in us as we empty? What is left but these omens of blood and bone? The earth takes it as it goes, watch the clock or plant the flag. We are gone before we arrive, lost in the telling and the toil. Humming along to the strange songs, singing along to lives we do not know. The world we learn is seldom the world we live, torn down and turned around by brick and word. All of us stories told as they are written. Each of us nothing but flung stones while everything is glass.