apostasy

It’s penetrated the foundation, it’s cracked the bright blue firmament, this smoke hardened heart. The arteries thicken and slow, the mortal blow a fist and a scalpel, a hurled brick and a dull blade permeating this fester of meat and mind. The nerves burn and fizzle, hot sparks and blunt howls. The whole of being turning into fragments and blurts. Words dribbling down my beard as I bury my breath star to star and stone by stone. Words thumbed from touch keys and the lumbering of blood, the continuity will tell you when it’s through with you. The scorched tongue touches the lips so slick and tender you think maybe all your telling is done. Then the mystery begins to contravene your conventions. Again you’re preaching against the tide, waves crashing down, fustigating you faith first.

There’s no pinnacle of abstraction to speak of, though it’s only the ghost that goes. There’s no banner to billow, no flag to proudly unfurl. It is the bones and their burdens, the animal always urging away. I scramble for purchase, I adjust my center and shift my stance, this self of skill wrapped around the empty I embody. Traffic passes, my cigar goes out, I gaze over drugstore cheaters as I feel around for a lighter. I drag at the cheroot, the flame feeling out the fire, this ritual at once this moment and a dozen intersections of the unintended intimate. Habituated to the text and the chemistry, the entity turns over. Burning in words and sparks.

I sit and smoke, so on and so forth, adjusting my breathing and moving my body according to the latest varietal pain. I do the things I have done before, heavy with the thoughts of what I will never do again, just old man war stories and a hunger for the halcyon never was. Still threaded with all manner of want and longing despite all the oblivion and devastation, these micro doses of subsistence hedonism, the paths and tangles of this tumbling down. This press of intention arising out of this litanous return, this poorly incarnated process spitting reasons, setting suns and rising winds. A breeze drawn through the reliquary, these prayers to faraways and long losts, this change of station the offering all along.