the sort of things you’d think you’d say

Beating uneasily my heart slips over the edges of the bowl, a steak plated to impress blood red over bone white, oh the savor, oh the sacrifice. The night is alive with appetites, a wet winter loosing a river of green fiber and stolid chitin, life ever striving to take a slice. This long losing over at long last not meaning there’s not more losing left, the transition from kin to decedent, the curtains drawn and secrets kept. I sit exposed to local gawkers and famished mosquitoes, meant for another round of sharp passes and easy pickings, grave punctuation hazily in wait as the night drags on and the days flee like roaches caught beneath the unforgiving gaze of kitchen light. You’d think the words would’ve worked their way out. You’d think the years would’ve gotten their lesson through.

It’s mostly gone, all the ways the words might have gone better. It’s all done, these ways I would’ve wanted it to go. There’s always a fuse waiting to burn faster, there’s always a tire ready to blow. There’s just rooms full of boxes and stories that no one knows, places to wake and drowse in, moments to shock and to shame. There’s the knowing that the only people you spoke with for years had turned you off ages ago, strangers by birth and association. The flesh turns cold then the ghost is gone, a fury lashing out for hours, a parcel waiting pick up in the full on empty. We all grieve and continue attending to our stations. We all get the comfort we’ve earned, alone in the big cold world.

So much for what I should have done. So much for what I’d do instead. The dead are the dead, well past caring and tenses. The fate we face, the fate we make, the hank of hair that gives us our uncanny powers shorn by way of exposition. Sisyphean years to grind us down to the nothing much we were always taken for, tanking against time for all our never nevers, promised paradise on the other side of a tomorrow that never comes. Burned to the soul, singed through meat and marrow, I fail and fail. My worth among the ruins and relics all sin wages and the exchange rate of ashes. The radio playing from another room, chatter and static from some distant memory of night in this hollowed house. The last light on at last is dowsed without a word or way to settle these hoards and debts. 

opt out

They’re going to have you take a number. They’re going to make you spell it out. The softest gray before the harder colors. The feeling grown into the bones, riding out the last of the light. Only warm around the wounds, the instrument a balloon losing air, the music so much exasperation killing time. The rain comes pacing the swollen moon, smoke always hanging around. The ache breaks like a gasping of atmosphere, like the lungs really laying one on. The offer almost ambushes you before the reflexes kick in, the choices picked over like late day donuts, like opportunity when it catches your dreams sleeping. That knocking that counts down to out.

It is not a want for words, it is not a wish for wings, the same old arc of sentient beings burned through to the least inkling marked across this inference, this name worn inside out. I am taken by the same old waking, the slow blaze of day weighing heavy from the instance of ignition, the push start of cold cognition into the relentless traffic coming at you head on. The claimant to the space, I trod along my limits, offended by the insistence of feeble limb and brittle will. A compass needle pointing along the ley lines of intention, a muttering of the meaningless mingled with oath and curse, I wear worse and worse. I carry my corpse in the middens of my plodding heart, staggering about the borders of this closed set, learning the earth by the way it bruises.

Each night it’s all the same, close walls and sinking ceilings, a blur of words and light with music seeping in and dopplering on. Crumpled up valentines and the stir of dancing ashes, these stars recorded and forgotten in one fell swoop. Weary flesh and the stench of failure foreshadowed in the architecture, the castle built with the tide on the rise, teetering on the brink of the topple. The self left to the elements as it dwindles, something marked by the wind and the rain and the beauty that goes bouncing by. This moment so feeble in the antecedents, so firm in the winnowing will, always just too late to take the wheel. Our best hopes buried before we let them die, this mortal pleading as the cruelty holds course.