tin can

I want to be here for the bones, so someone will remember where they’re buried. I want to be here for the blood that still strives and thrives. There’s no other argument here to linger other than that the limits of the other options. Better something than nothing, both brain and gut agree. But the entity is something that the wind blows through. The entity is something painted on a cave wall. The entity knows the off switch. Sometimes the can you kick on down the gutter is a bucket. 

The day is rapt with screaming children. The day rings out with the sound of many engines. The sun thinks it’s summer, the wind says it’s fall. The sugar gushes and the salt just drips, leaf shush and leaf crunch at once as the steps are dragged out into the open dusk. Palms up, fingers stretched around blue blazes, the seeing shifts. The blown top bottle remits its exuberance, retreats from the physics by the backroads of time, and sits stoppered and sealed around that frenzied intention. You put away your pretty things and bargain reckless for the souls of children dying in their sleep.

There goes another used to be epitome. Some lesson learned from every wreck heaped beside the road. There goes the very reason no one else knows. We labor through the days we don’t laze away, we linger hard in the faithless night. We swear our outrages and our spells, tiny hooks and fish bone cantrips, the staggered steps tripping up our breath and the seething hexes hiding behind our hearts. The candle flickers and you feel it behind you, heavy and pitiless gazing through the backs of your eyes. Caught in a fist, strung on a line, a tin can full of ashes left on the shelf.