thorns

I don’t quite know how to navigate above or below, however I am unfolded I do not reach the sun. The day is not my element and the night is not my friend, the words strung from end to end without blood or breath to carry them. Scratches on the asylum walls, petitions from prisons left awaiting dust, the tracks left before the magma made them stay. Some puzzle to encumber a scholar’s notes, a heap of unsent signals and letters left in the tablet. A flower pressed in a Bible, a painting of a rose. Just bones left in the wilderness, a headstone tripped upon in the depths of the woods. Fragments that will not fit, and do not serve this life. When you stop to smell the roses, the thorns that remind you where you are.

Neither satisfaction or survival, the words a slow leak and a desperate tether, they spin and spit  and circle the pit. They creep and the crumble, ever overreaching, always a little too blue and askew. The same song on shuffle, bridge and chorus, bar after bar always too little too far. Sentenced to repetition unto senescence, the dereliction until the dereliction becomes the duty, the animal in its run. The blackberry brambles gone reckless, raking skin and tearing cloth, clinging to the right of way and the road, every course the insistence to reach the sun. Something to the common striving, the reluctance to retreat. The press of the moon upon this heft of meat and inkling. The call of the absent kiss.

There is no love in the dreaming, just the wounds from where it lost its wings. There is no future I see for me that I would want. The world turns, the old fights are going concerns and age old campaigns. There is blood hunger and blood burning, skin in the game down to the smoldering bones. The skill sets that speak in close, the drive to go out good a blinker wired hard into the ideation, a hunk of seething nothing sicced at the vulnerable and the vital. An SUV takes a T turn up my driveway, crushing weeds and sticks as it goes. These words both gut and ghost, the hard calls all made for me. All the touches left draw blood.