druthers

The world doesn’t love you, but the world doesn’t know. It doesn’t pick the pieces it plays, it shuffles through the list. The broom on the sidewalk, the bird on the wire. The skin you were given giving in, tensile strength and the rough and ready. The rifle’s loud report in the cold dead night. The world only knows the dos and don’ts, not the struggle or the fitful shifts. You guess wrong just once and you are gone, recycled into basic elements and the seeds of the need to know, the hungry earth and the microfauna carrying on long after the ensemble has taken its bows and went off their separate ways. You make your bets, you take your chances. Maybe you get lucky, and get to have your say. 

The voice of fate, the curiosity of the furies, the call for a new deck and a knock on the cut. Empty pockets and spent gelt, the cherished ones disown you, and you gather up your guilt and your guns and leave. You can’t go home, you don’t have to stay here. Some of us here to punish others, some of us here to sweat and swing. The luck of the draw and the eye of the beholder, the path allows a few turns and swerves. We are weighted down in words that put everything in your lap, the laws and aphorisms written to protect kings and other thieves, these stories that are woven into the muttering meat of our minds. We all have our burdens to carry, but we were built to carry them together. Instead we live out other people’s lies, rattling around the maps we are given. Looking at the stars and taking it personal.

The words just spill out into the street, they slop over the gutters and clutter up the walk. The words get in everything, they stain your fingers, they get stuck between your teeth. There’s not much I can do about it. I’ve been disappearing for years. You go wrong for too long, that’s the way you stay, face froze in that strict rictus. Named and numbered, tossed aside like the trash you always new you were. The fight inside goes on, whatever the name they give you. The fight goes on, whatever the diagnosis may be. I have my say, though seldom my way. I can’t help it if there’s no one left to listen when I’ve got nothing to say. I can’t help it if I don’t know how to say what can’t be heard.