cup

The coffee steams and dribbles as it pours, leaving brown bubbles clustering, swirls upon the hot mirror black skin. You take it black, small sips between blowing through you know how to whistle lips. You like it bitter, something sharp to put in your mouth, something hot to burn in trickles down your throat. The sun unseen still blinds, calling its shots as it banks the bright off cloud and vapor, any surface available to reflect off. Albedo and refraction as the train sound swallows all the engines and incidentals, a sip of coffee, the spirit a fog upon the lens. 

It is the work of the earth, it is the price of the sky. The lively colors give way to the muted blues and bruise black end of the bandwidth, the lingering whiff of petrichor and the burdensome language of stones. The meat wading through the mud, the monkey mind stinking up the stars with the flung dung of its stories. Irredeemable we creep on, never mind the turnover. Dishonorable we lie and lie, these late epoch villages at last large enough to support our endless deceptions. It runneth over and still we keep on pouring, lest our neighbors get a sip. 

It hurts to walk, it hurts to breathe, as life goes on the pains close in. Each day a gift, each day a gaffe, the monkey’s paw and the god grift. Once it is broken, no king’s craft can mend it. Once it is busted, it is gone. The bread they break across your back, the community they grow from your exclusion. Secret rituals and flagrant prayers and a thousand curses spat in your face. Still they tremble and gibber away, the teeth closing around their hearts of the demons of their own making. They pace their immaculate floors in fear of the death that is the only certainty, the night so black all about their rotten tooth souls, terror always waiting behind each locked door. You swallow the bitter, you live in the dark. Death comes and you fill your cup.