lest you linger

Before you know it you are braced before the last door left, shoulder hard to the bargain of your weary bones and your belabored back, the last wave fast upon you. So much for the life you led, so much for bellowed oaths and soft bellied prayer, so much for your fabled strength and storied winning streak. This is the onslaught and not friend or foe or unyielding god there  to offer up arms or fortitude your way. At once some teetering through the frame, a flicker from a star. Coming at you whatever direction you’re headed, destination or interception, this busted seal, this counting down the clock. At last the losing, that last moment of the mirror.

Call me where your wind runs down. Call me when the smoke no longer clears, the obduracy of oblivion with fire always fresh and lies all we know. We lay in the cut or stray in the weeds, watching walls crumble and words burn. Tired claims bleeding through the liminal, every turned stone a trick of the tongue in this hypnotized ubiquity. Wave after wave of gods washing in after the fact, hindsight as holy as it gets. Maybe you mangle oaths like that one-eyed such and such that did you dirty not so long ago. Maybe that is the sense you step to, dancing with the shoes that bring you, barefoot reeling around the fire in your mind. Working in the direction of the ruin.

Grayer and grimmer with the blazing down of days, bones a shimmer as they gossip and grind. The words just tumble as the sands jitter and fall, hands clapping and staggering blind, laughing and weeping as each bump comes harder. A discord of blood and grease, heart beating dervish dances, the breath heavy curtains jostled with indifference. Tripped and thumped and clouted, forgetting the particulars of each bruise and blow. Just the skies smudged brown and the tree all a tremble. Love loosed like a miner’s canary, a grievance sorely missed, a berserk horde seething with a rage past hatred held back by door and shoulder and spine. Missed kisses a litany flashing before your eyes and a fury in your grin, you leave the last door to its own devices and ready your every welcome.