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.