hot foot hearts

The night always has us harder put, the night always over the rubicon. The day does its part, the ill lit precipices and the brutality of eye candy. It calls us by our mirrors and shades, knowing the sausage to make lemonade. Lanky and bright and callow, the day pushes buttons and dots and dashes, lays it in deep with the lashes. But the night starts with loose curses, the names and numbers scribbled in the margins of its grimoire, the hammered grammar of every regretted sin thick upon your tongue. The art imbued through sleepless writhing and taking stock, the weight this lonesome makes of the missing moon. 

I am backlit with cobwebs and moths cutting silhouettes. Draped in tattered vestments, my beard crisped by smoke, my fingers always smelling of fire. I abandon old altars to fresh gods, let the mud and the masonry call out to vagabond devils and limber spirits, let the wasps take the hen house and the swifts glut the dusk. Let the bricks crumble as my flesh dissolves, let the ending pay off just once. All the sick and whispers running listless through the dark, all the dreams gathered for black medicine cantrips, all the sacred carved up for souvenirs. The machine coughs and grinds, clouted with ghosts and oxidation.

There’s always someone creeping beneath the windows. There’s always someone checking all the doors. There’s a legion waiting to fulfill every sneaking suspicion, a gang to wear the colors of your every foolish fear. We are witness to the war of attrition of our existence, heads full of bullets abandoned to madness dancing to our hot foot hearts. Spent spells and spat out incantations loop through life and limb, one breath racing through us like Santa around the globe, dusty libraries and brooding mausoleums spilling from our wounds. Stuck in the words, forever rounding the corner, always left in the empty tense. I linger in the cruel invective and wicked epithets that serve as my amens and seal the moment unspoken. The angel holding in the secret with a finger to your lips, the clearing in the forest lit by stars and the beckoning flame.