altitude

We bump and scuff about inside the dregs of the sky, transforming leaf and limb and light into us, we rot and bleed and evacuate into the rest. Its quite a procedure we’re caught up in, plopping out of the unsettled earth into our clothes and words and structures, unshakable in our convictions, nostalgic for our acquittals. We dress our elders up as gods and titans and devour their worlds as they wane and fall, we send our trash and trinkets into the heavens so we can watch our souls be stolen by burlesques and glissades, these edelweiss and columbines— the laurels our heroes long for that keeps the sherpas in the black. The altitude past our aptitude, the yearning evermore.

It feels like I have always been here, though I remember when I was new. I don’t remember the fall or my arrival. My name is not my name, but I answer to it anyway. Time is like that when it flies, and it’s like that when it stands still— that’s right time, I’m watching you. The hitch has long been gone from my giddy up, just some fifth business cameos and a little background art left me. Life is like that— always catering to the hungry talent and the latest trends. I haven’t had a lead since my thirties, and even my character work has gone largely unreviewed. I can’t dance, don’t play, and never could carry a tune too long. I still do my own stunts, only the falls seem to linger. 

The air shifts, the earth trembles. Whole cultures dissolve in moments, vaporized or painted in boiling stone. Leviathan awakes and does its shtick. We are only mirage and moonlight, a soup of synapse and symbol, the bead of the weld running down the efflorescent seam. The cauldron of stars and convergence all left sticking to our frailty, the mind always climbing Jacob’s ladder, running in loops and circles. You shake us up and watch us become some other, we shed our skin and start again. Here beset by rapacious minds and endless translation we rewrite each moment we know, missing everything but getting a rain check. The words always playing every side, the last one always the winner until the next iteration. I scribble away like I know.