want

The seasons procreate their own little seeds, not the sparrows or the swallows or the lilies of the field, but the nettled knots of expectations that come splitting out our skulls. Our insistence to play by our rules while never abiding the regulations that nature has written into the architecture. The playing of a game we acknowledge only when we think we’re winning, the rules dashed to pieces at our first inconvenience. Romance and art and the labors that we savor. Culture that tells us what isn’t is so. Minimizing what we lack, obfuscating all we do not understand. More often than not we play ourselves and slaver gratefully for the privilege.

It is in the ache unanswered, the want that I can’t shake off. I listen to the sounds in the distance, fireworks and sirens and the mournful rumbling of a traveling train. I watch as the flocks disband and reassemble, the crows and swallows and raptors and shorebirds that the geography still allows. I try to stay out of my heart and head, but I have posted up there, and in these glutted interiors I camp. Inside most days the gun is in my mouth, my finger on the trigger. I tend to the tasks allotted someone of my station, the small routines barely sustained, the head and shoulders bowed and stooped as is expected from the help. I take the beatings in bitterness and with excessive invective, but I take them all the same.

The empty doesn’t care much, but it likes to entertain. The places where the culture doesn’t reach, the lives where the world won’t fit, the iterations the words only come to debase and abuse. It is enough that we can’t complete the circuits, the connections lost to disuse and the stations that are placed upon our broken crowns. The stories we replay out of hope and habit, the not in this lifetime for all us silly rabbits, having gone too far or not nearly far enough depending on the hole and heart. Crisp descriptors to fit us with disgust or contempt, the language always working on the coverup, the eloquence left to grifters and the game. My lack is mostly mine, a distrust hardened by lovely lies and wisened eyes and the persuasion of well turned limbs. Gray and graven and long abandoned, this unmet want more me than I am myself. A spitting image, in it for the spit.