ten nails

The room is full of dust and smoke, a little too big for the light in the corner. The room is clenched and crowded, mostly detritus and debris. The ghost and the guiding hope long gone, the house all but drained of home, the life left there the waiting around to die type. The nights are awful, the days untenable, and they keep on coming. Dead birds soft and limp in the dirt, wings done with the sky. You dwindle as the burdens grow. More and more you are less and less.

It is the season of gray and gloom. It is the season of mud. Days that are mostly dawn and dusk, days where the earth drags the rain from the sky in hints and whispers, days where nothing moves but stones and stars. Ink spent and ink imagined, roads of discourse only slips and silhouettes, all the oratory the on the inside kind. Skull hearted thinking smeared across the pavement, a radio playing softly in the atmosphere. Fewer tweets and tropes, just these sullen repetitions and suicide dreams. The short story? Never ask a hammer.

Count the birds inside your dreams. Count the wings while you sleep. The empty will be there when you wake. Look to love, look to beauty— they will kill you where you stand. The small comforts die hardest, though they’re the first to go. That cup, that slice, that smoke. The light in their eyes, that sound in your throat. Another nail in the coffin, another star in the firmament. Choking on the installment plan, flecks of spittle and a heart in alarm. The numbers running uphill backwards, the done where it’s driven.