the numbers

 The line that’s there is never straight. Space and time assure that it’s up to something. From rhythm to rictus, from fruit to dirt, there are more than roads and travel to getting here. It’s in the way you read it, beats and breaths and good intentions. It’s in the way it sings to you, moving with the burning air through the blood. The screams and cries and triumphs of lung, tooth, and tongue. The shuffle of the deck and the numbers you assign your meaning to. You are here, and then you’re not. You are here until you aren’t me or you. Repeat until no one is anyone anymore. 

We sing the songs and the bridges burn. We sing the songs of stars and martyrs and the least likely explanation. It was there and it was fancied by some ancestors or some other antecedents, it was brought out and dusted off beneath some winter tree, or read from a book at some elder’s burial. The words don’t care for what you meant, or their phonemes, or the opinion of the dictionary. They are there, written or spoke or waiting in the songlines unto their becoming. They build up and pile on and laugh as we use them to chase our tails and tie our tongues into loose change and dumb talk. They press us up against it, kiss us until we cough and spit them out. 

One thing leads to another, something always awaiting invention, something leading us by our invective and our broken bible stories. The poem of bare skin and singed hair, the poetry of the embers and the flesh, your eyes at the moment the words and your will are one. Bare feet sinking in the sand to find the sea between your toes, the blind sun and the gibbering gulls, the wind another tide keeping time in your voice. This love and its ending, that love and its ignition, the steps leading into the forest followed in full credulity. Every moment going one way or another, every misstep still stepping, every mistake taken as a given in the calculations. Love me, love me naught, the same fate for every petal, the same way of all flesh. The math the tongue of the swallow’s fall, everything always happens at once.