low

Eyes closed, you listen closely to the music ricochets and rebounds off the dim lit walls. Eyes closed, you hear the notes and the ringing of the lights. It’s this narrow walkway, it’s this lifetime of electricity and earth. The places where the spiders gather, the windowsill littered with drowsy flies. The creeping flesh, the assembling dust, the weary years singing out through the joinery and the joists. The clinking of chain and gate and flagpole hoist. The cool wind turning old bones cold. This skin a succession of whim and wound, wrapped around this sickness, swaddled in indifference. The dull ache dug in below the heart, lamp lit and radiating pall and pain.

Strange to be where the day has gone. Strange to bear the brunt of nightfall and all those generations of sin. The song dies down and the rats gnaw and skitter. You shift your stance to the crack of back and bone. Useless to the past and helpless before tomorrow, this sorrow sounds out, a midnight chime of another time. Feeble flesh and second hand words, the burning bush and a handful of bird. The heavy door bolted despite the crack down the center. The wood distressed by some uninvited ingress, the huff and puff perhaps at last enough. Would that there was a wolf waiting. Would that the words could stay.

Maybe this night will be enough. Maybe the meter will finally turn over. It feels like sorrow, it feels like sinking, it feels like the surrender is finally setting in. Staring at a screen, staring at the ceiling, staring at some memory that all but tears me in half. A remainder of a remainder, the dredges and the dregs. As worthless as any treasure buried, as worthless as gold laden galleons sunken to the bottom of the sea. This soul the color of pavement, this soul as nimble as a brick. A small bird dead at the foothills of heaven. Broken wings and pierced breast the foundation of this sorry faith, every temple at its best when it’s burned to the ground.