humdrum

The tide of dust slowly swallows the static and the forgotten. Music seeping through the rat clambered walls, the separate faiths of song haunt the house while the ubiquitous bass thumping down the street. The low keeps diving and the ghosts keep driving nails through my skull, the last contrivance of reason long since hacked to pieces in the basement of my brain. Mercurial turns from sob to seethe dance me around the madhouse days, beating my head against the wall, my heart and head bricked into the masonry. Madness around every corner, help a curiosity from a quainter era. The gates all locked and the gardens a shambles even the serpent shirks. The fruit all fallen and not a tree in sight. 

The house is still, but there is no peace. Too many crimes committed inside its crumbling walls, too many sins have taken up residence beneath its eaves. Hell doesn’t happen all at once, people decide to inflict it upon themselves and others, dull and dumb and breaking out all over.  No one listening turns to no one to listen turns to the grunts and mutters of an obvious nutter. A reflexive cruelty built into society, law largely the need to kick them when they’re down, religion always punching in that direction. The flag of the abattoir waving proudly over every nation, the fires of perdition turning over the motor of each automobile, gifting the atmosphere with a little less breathing. The glow of screens and a single gaudy lamp reveal the latest abomination.

My old man bones hurt so I let old man moans slip, cursing under and over my breath. The old furies have returned to my blood, and with nothing to drug or distract there’s little to my act. I tire of the contempt and the mockery. I tire of the fear and the fleeing. A lonely and beset child grown into a lonely and feared beast, I have become a bouquet of quirks and afflictions, unpleasant and unlovable and irredeemable. It will only get worse as the private and professional fustigations and drubbings of the last couple of decades take their toll. The humdrum hell of each and every day worse than the next blaring away the most persistent lesson of my life. The sooner it’s over, the better.