the curve

 Don’t believe everything you hear— the crazy can know they’re crazy. Don’t believe everything you read— sometimes a fool knows that they’re a fool. I’m always a few dollars short, I’m always a couple steps behind. You tell me straight out, but I might not follow. You read me the riot act, all you get is the riot. It isn’t like it’s a competition, everybody can be wrong at once. It isn’t really a contest, I’m just pointed in the same direction as the doom. Entropy spilling from my fingers, devastation dripping off my tongue. Neither a name or a number, I’m just a beggar that won’t do the asking. The aspect and the animal, the sooth that goes unsaid. Cast me out or tag me in, the gutters run red whither way I turn. Mostly I do the bleeding, but who knows when the flesh will relent? Mostly I am way behind, but you can never tell until you measure the curve. 

The day is so thin at both ends it begins to buckle in the middle. The day is so overworked, it can’t help but to fall apart. Beaten from the cement, pried from the grip of root and earth, dug out from under the waning moon and wasted stars. The night rises from the grave of the day, the rot from my wounds sunken into my stuttering heart, the steady already leeched from my spindly limbs. Time gallops past with me grabbing after its tail, time rattles down the tracks as futilely grasp and stumble. My back bends and my bones bleat, fading from their labors. All the blanks already filled out, despite my never having read them. Fate falls fast upon your crown once every possibility has been cut loose. The turn of phrase, the loud report, the reckoning of the arrow. 

It rises and falls, the shape of the data. It rises and falls as the probabilities spread. Ahead or behind or in the heavy handed middlings, we all take our places. Sooner or later we all meet our match. We race to our reckoning or fall to our means. It begins with time as thick as honey, it ends with the years thin and slick, barely speaking before the breath gives out. Barely living before too late is at the gates. I have been nothing but a waste and a curse, a blight before my ancestors, the antecedent of a thousand pains and ruins. Missing the mark with every aim, losing the point before I even get the drift. I know I’m done, I know I’m finished. These pointless words going nowhere, this wasted tale only wheels spinning in the mud. Making it all worse while waiting for a place to put the end.