animal

I have come to pick my teeth. I have come to part the seas, these winds that befall like ellipses the stagger between stories. Enough of this stitch of itching, this glimpse of sky, this depth of flesh. These lungs at last emptied, this voice at last silent. No claim, no grace, no contagion to give a motive or grant a name. It is just staying too long where the love’s all lost, nothing to grant the traction, nothing to excuse the blade. Oh words, how I have failed you. This brief blooming extinguished, another animal out of place. We lose pace, spill into habit and the periphery, eventually only memory and punctuation. I could tell you, but my trying is all but done.

At the moment I am meat and I am sorry. I am on yet another day atop the blur of hours and words I metabolize and exude, the story as it stutter stops, the horrors of the geologic and the historic. All around sound klaxons of dissembling, the dogma of doubling down somehow now the de facto, the race to oblivion prepared one billion ways. Thoughts smeared across the sky in some typical stupor, I breathe and cough and long well enough. Something in the way the pain bears down, in the way pleasure disappears into the rear view, the visible spectrum of the freeway lit that ceaseless moment as we move on and on. These words only glue for the mood I imbue.

It is the roach favored by surface tension, the ghost by the story and the crack of the fire. It is another last day, the reckoning of the rest, the restlessness of 3am in music and sign. Just me and the beasts on my bed, a bellows of song and sighs under the ministrations of a reading lamp. I have lived past my dreams and my readiness to pretend. Dust settles as smoke coils, a muted trumpet plays with the melody and the scales. Repetitions of the singular, recursions lifting their skirts, every plot eventually tennis. Each of us our mythos and where we put our mouths, red of tooth or bleating bloody murder, a set of maps and calculations as to every stiff and stray. So I long with the lights left on and the music playing. So that old black magic comes beating down my door.