runoff

It is the more obdurate of elements that linger, muddying up the gutters, poisoning the wells. The long list of molecules that create an unsavory sentience, a pretty heavy asterisk when it comes to the ruins we imbue, the long apologia of our wisdom bound inexorably to our fields and our flesh. Inundated with ambiguated superfund sites and the ubiquitous invasion of the body by microplastics, drenched with the spit of ten thousand lies per hour and ears ringing from the radio’s level headed discussion of the economic benefits of death squads, the illness is water to fishes. The illness is the zeitgeist as it readies the graves.

I run a little toxic, I’ve burned through lives, both nines and halves. I leave trails of mud and expletives, muttering curse and superlatives as I stumble into brick and board, the decades of decay on display in my wake. A rat-a-tat-tat of tatters, a dirty standard of smoke and grime moving against the rhythm, a ballad fumbled by tongue and intention. Nearing six decades at it, heavy with the inevitable breakage, the lessened being a full time job. Harmful even a distance, the aura irradiates the wide collateral with shards and shots of entropy. The hazardous runoff of this drag and drop.

We say goodbye to our elders as we serve our dumb death gods, pledge allegiance to the telling instead of the truth, go for the words when we lose our grasp of the actually extant. I serve my sentences in the classic run on style, huddle in structures deep in epilogue, rot and wreckage the only reasons. The cold and the rain running through the roof and the statics of the contrarian construction meet the limits of the instrument and a table read of diminishing returns. Each day there are vicious little violences, each day the braying cackles of pitiful villains, nosy neighbors and all season snitches working every angle. The horizon rises to swallow the sun, the old wounds all worse and spreading.