slow

The dreams don’t shake off with the day still hours away, with the weary work of shoulders and knees, with the clamber of flesh and bone. It is still, though not quiet. An atmospheric hum, the low growl of pavement and tires and the vague machinery that grinds down into clockwork and case studies, slabs and wires strung across the breath and stir of the earth. The wind through the windows, the odd longing of left on lamps and anticipatory engines as the house and the host chase the tails of ghosts. The mind idles in between, the day to day, the scene by scene.

The limbs slow and the sun crawls, the sky sorted and cycled. Evidence accumulates and is almost instantly forgotten, the world as thin and permeable as any glamour, meanings shifting along the sinister as we are perpetually corrupted and sold into bondage or off for parts. A feather upon a fence, the shards of a broken cup, a pigeon killed and lost by a harried raptor now occulted in the open giving dust to dust. A shoe print in the soft soil, the green shoots and greedy sprouts going the way of a California winter. Silhouettes printed on the inside of the eyes as the day trades skins with the dusk, something gone, something lost along the road unfollowed. The going is gathering, giddy in the gutters of our beings.

Boxes and screens and asphalt, flags and words and declarations, the flickering nothing we have made of a once wide world. The worst animal now in crazed undulations as it dances its riotous celebration of victory in a slaughterhouse conflagration, a passionate expression of its transformation from entity to meat. The triumphant hallelujahs straight into the maw of extinction sound from every corner as some venerable line of hokum is sold as gospel, the infinite promised though is doesn’t exist. Your life is more than some Bible story, it is owed more credence that some dead tongued creation myth. Your life is more than the empty threats and hollow promises of the next world over, it is owed more reverence than words strung on shiny tinsel and colored lights. We go in these last spasms as we beat our brains into blood and mush, declaring our power as we pay our debt to the dirt. Night falls and we huddle in hubris’s last glow, our lullabies the lies that stripped us of our lives.