everybody knows

So the coiling smoke feathers past my face, head and shoulders hung over the lit ember, weary down to the word. Bones soaked in the oaths of blood and the black grasp of gravity ache unto ignition, ache unto the crush of days feels like destiny, slab after slab of certainty on you from the sky on down. Dizzy from the breath pressed, prayers gone forever out the window as the road blurs by, you know me by beckon and by burn. So much live spent for such a poor return on learn, the earnestness of every grave. 

The earth hits hard though halos abound, buttressed by rock and root and concrete armor, on your ear with a message from the sun. The place staggers and stumbles, a contagion of crossroads and mislead physics, the collateral of self strewn all about the landscape of the senses. Betrothed to worldly burdens and mortal stakes, we play on until we’re played out. Arrows loosed to heaven and the terms of fate’s aim, some agency given up to god, the dirty done to so much work. 

As if it’s anything but a spent missive, an undetonated valentine. These miserable years upon the wheel, these ages left to longing. Some story about the constellations, some story about the way the moon reaches around the shoulders of the world. Eyes that can’t be unseen or seen again, the way a window opens to another world in the first brief moments upon waking, the night a notion always open to interpretation and witchery. What do I but fizzle and flicker, a riddle left to the whims of the wind? The list and the litany, the hole where the thoughts and prayers trickle in. The echoes in the sky at night, the stories we pin on the stars.