machined

Gray for gray, silky shadow and sunken sun, the season has its say. Dawn slows and dusk lingers, the stars strut and stroll, occult through cloud and moon. The animal laments the cage bar by bar, singing its wounded song. The entity is mystified as its words turn to dust, suffering the incarnation and the many errors of this iteration. And so I arrive, a steady keening into the empty, a lonely smoking in the dark. I suffer at the culmination of the consequences, dead to the world but still plodding on. Worn out and obsolete I rattle on through the depths of the night. Only able to hone these hungers, fit only to resonate this one fixed want. This is how the pieces work. This is where they left the parts.

This is the B side of the life of the mind. This is the spill of shadow, this is the press of light. Stack the bricks and watch the clock, the world is never still, shifting gears and walking between skins. The earth a tumult of furious iron, seething to the sky while every mote and molecule makes its move. The soil breathes us in and out, every tribe and legion abiding by all the law that is, stardust still dust just the same. The sky we burn that first breath, the spirit loosed, humble clay and brambles crown. Each of us an effigy fed to a different flame.

So I’m smoking on the front porch, as lights incant and shadows bow, a fixture in the evenings and a fool on display. I fulfill routines designed around factors that no longer exist, clunk and clatter and sputter and fume. Simple facts become conundrums, the world you were built for never having come to pass, you serve out a sentence delivered by your head and a universe that doesn’t particularly give a fuck. I ache my ache, I imbue further static into the abstraction. Conversations curved around the gravity wells left by dreams collapsing, letters to once were lovers and past tense friends to encode and magnify. More and more, it’s just me talking. A skip around the maypole, a soft shoe on the grave. The depth of night steals this last quintessence, the candle resigned to the futility of its flicker.