the rudiments

The life that you live goes by in inch and hairbreadths, jostling you along the walkway, throwing elbows while breathing down your neck. The life that is claimed moves in years and miles, a road winding through the mountains with barely a mention of the scenery. It has a flag and a bible and a tradition to defend. Honored ancestors and stubborn antecedents to turn the stream this and that away, stones to slow and add suspense, dams to pool the cool waters before they come tumbling down the peak. The stories that churn and roil within this skin while the world wails away upon the impending self. 

It’s the keeping of the time, it’s the drubbings of the heart, this red x this perceptive pinpoint. The exes in exponentials, the plodding apostasies, and the mind always livid in the fitting rooms. The drizzled reasons manifest out of thin air, the then and therefores of this storied evermore, the strata of observations and rudiments in aid of navigation. The Hail Marys and the blessed bes, this tangle of stumble and jungle, the mingling of crude gaffe and honed truths depending on the skill of the hand. The worn on down to the persistent bones, tattered rags and withered tissues, slack of skin and devoted to the dust. A question writhing through each moment craving the context of engagement.

The days get longer as the world turns and burns. You are measured, you are marked. Bound by breath and flesh and brackets, the words that mean so little still can bite me stick. A trick of the symbols, the hard bitten human parts that lock us like headlighted deer, the steer and stir of would and were hardwired in animal and entity. Two brains all a tumble and the gods that campaign in your guts talking all at once, the howling as the sirens sound, the drool at the ringing of the bell. Entangled in the interminable earth and the drift of myth and the soundings of the furthest stars, we run in rivers and we settle in skies. At the roots of everything with eyes fixed to the horizon.