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.