9 mile cigarette

There’s not much to do once the sinking sets in, once you feel the collapse throughout the collateral, the drag of the earth’s core gripping at your depths. Even the loosed sigh holds on as it descends, the inevitable pull, the winged fall. It’s going and going and then it’s gone. This likely isn’t news to more than a few of you. You fly, you fight, you sit tight and smoke in the corner. Down to me and the dreams I don’t remember, down to me and the mystery unresolvably irreconcilable. Then ashes and dirt and the long look away.

The repetitions and the echoes, the memories etched into the dreaming and the husk, the tapping of happenstance upon this fated skull long enough for a pin drop, a name around this who and here and now. Even with this hole worn through the world coming out the wound in the bottom of my right foot I act as though I can maybe still walk it off. Living is another set of superstitions knotted up in the continuity, stories despite all the missteps and the mysteries, each path inevitable while you’re on it. Not as bad, but plenty worse I began to pace the statuary. Out of initiative and means of egress. 

Curled up here with my stubborn wounds and worn mementos, I take another moment to fill in the blanks. There’s no lore I hold from the unseen shore, no power I am beholding to, no faith to rub my nose in. No stake in heavens or hells, no deadworlds to awake to, no cigarette to smoke that’s 9 miles long. Holed up to tell what doesn’t show, I wait and set down a verse or two, knowing mostly futility. Here I go, empty handed before apathy and enmity, leaving words in my wake. Only time going by and the implacable fist of gravity, pacing the boards by the glow of the ghost light, anxious for the end.

snips, snails

The words circle, the words spin, the words become and begin. There’s really no excuse. Just padding out the package, just filling out the forms, these the go through motions we have gone through before. These bone picked prayers, these prefabricated miracles, all popped pills and burst bubbles. Another sort of pang, a twitch, a spasm. An impulse of trumped up synapses and short circuits. Memory and fantasy, the anecdotal gussying up of the facts. The soul soaked in song and story, this eternal scene of the crime as in art and not unclad diatribe. The ephemera the essence, I engage in this rifling through the pockets and summoning the same old same old.

These months have been lost to ghosts and grief, the sticky blood, the waxy remnant touching me long after the incidents. That and my frailty and decay overtaking my ability to stay bipedal have stole all but the spark from me. Days and days of pain and fever tinged with the taste of earned hell and everyday enmity have dulled what few distinctions I can manage to the drag and draw of the capricious winds of fate. Languishing like an ingenue over an insufficiency of suitors and hunkered down like a wounded bear waiting to make its last stand, lost in my own illnesses and the dewy dreams of others, I am without warrant or worth. The words don’t need my damage.

The mortal portion dulls and diminishes, it offers the sharp assessments of the environment and the elements, and the alarming onslaught of decrepitude in body and mind. I am beset with hard facts and bitter truths, and some sort of intrinsic urge to keep working that dead horse. This is the ritual, this is the rhythm, this is the something all this nothing pursues. Out of clever, out of craft, I try to turn the engine over. The process there along with the snails and puppy dog tails, a burden of the build, the shards of the insulted ancestors and shattered antecedents make a tradecraft from tricks and tics. Lack and want and the poem that’s nearly now.