interlude

I’m supposed to take a load off, but here I am with gravity in my lap. I’m supposed to rest up, but instead I work my wounds. No sleep for the wicked, no respite for the good, I try to idle below this tide of mind. Thinking up one side and down its corollary, the ball thrown at the wall comes back after its counterpart. The boundless attachments that tether and tear the claw and tooth of the continuity, to abandon the tree as the leaf leaves the limb only a virtue to the overtures, the unseen the shape of every self. Tossed upon the abstract and painted in the distinctions that they learned me, I ricochet around the affects while holding to the form. A years of hard taught pariah has left me fluent in adversary. It takes a lot of work for me not to take it wrong.

It was only yesterday this got started; I’ve been doing this for a thousand years. We work over the moment with wants and words, forever on this precipice, falling harder with every step. My heart flies south and I switch towards the rhapsodic, serifs prettying up the penmanship, the heights all rapturous about the statuary. It’s a low that stays hard put, no matter how you shuffle the say so, a story we all know about waking naked in the night. The urge to gather around flag or fire, the commiseration of weeped in beers, the company of bellies against the bar. Instead the devil takes a pasting for trying to have a word, the abyss gets an earful. All this age old sorrow, weary from the war. 

We go by the roads we travel, we go by the names we know. We grow towards what light we are allowed, shaped by hill and stream, laden by the mountains and the sea. The breadcrumbs are eaten by unseen birds as the bull mounts the moon. We arrive in this land of familiar strangers, hewn by work and tools we will never know, as if told in a story. As if sailing by the consent of the stars and with the wind on a lead. There is a heated argument between plunder and dissolution we show up in the middle of where we are urged towards teams and gods and flags. There’s not much to it unless you never learned how to play along. When you don’t get it, you make it up on your own. You can turn out to be anyone like that, even no one at all.