stutter step

The slow burn sky fumes blue as the green limb loll and sway, summer here at long last despite the calendar settled seasons, the air glistening with the contentions of the flesh. The breath grows shallow as the conflagration marks the wind, the heavy heart never learning to lift with the legs. The body both the lesson and the learning, the message and the bottle bobbing in the froth and spittle of the unrelenting soliloquy, the ocean a reliquary of the unrequited reachings in the tide of mind. Every telling comes after the epilogue, every lesson shows up at the wrong door or late. These last days spent coiled in the aspect of the animal, the beast always a hair trigger from a raised occasion, a head fake to break the knees of the inevitable and a stutter step into the attack. The branches from the break, the reason from the roots. 

These are the downhill days, the little by little adding up to a lot, the same old story suddenly alarming and new because now it’s landed in my lap. Life and its slapstick and its shtick, the mission drift of the tried and true written in stick and stone and black and blue. The script straight from the appendixes of the canon, a warning shot fired off across the brow, the language with its ugliest outfits laid out on the bed. The downward dwindle as our specificity gives up, our portion mostly in the past tense until it isn’t there at all. A correction so coarse that it peels the bark off of me, another wound due to the way the world will walk right through you.

We are the prophesied ash, we are the resignations unto the earth. Either the dire or the dotage, the limits of the mettle, the obduracy of the bone. The mysteries linger as the seasons lap us, slow to warm and vulnerable at more unreasonable extremes, everything worn down but the wishing. Accepting my failings and my fate, I creep and crawl these dull circles, the ritual another intrinsic engine left out in the weather, the path clotted with foxtails and strewn with spider silk. Left with duties to shirk and fights that can’t be avoided, my dreams don’t find me in my sleep. Only ink, so to speak. The story, so you say. The words where they could be left on read. The swelter breaks late in the day, endings come like the providence of sparrows.