contagion

It’s the fix of the dead eyed acolytes, it’s the spell check urgency of the unachieved corrections trailing the moment like train cars all rattling down the tracks, it’s the forced card emerging from the contingency of the gaffed deck. There’s no surprise despite the exclamation marks, no point outside this specific feeding frenzy.  Another fractured frame up, the picture never filled, the quest never completed. Only an anthem whispered in the night by all these chosen ghosts. Only a story you’re hoping would show.

There goes the scheme of sky, there goes the press of the stretch of shadows, another breath and counting. Wrong ears, wrong eyes, wrong time and wrong size. Once things start happening there’s never the right amount of telling, either ruckus or recipe, prophecy or hindsight ascendant. Creepy crawling along ley lines and reckless minds, insidious and vile in their fascinations. It goes slow, then speeds up, like Tina Turner rolling on the river. The allusion lingers despite the malingering of monsters.

There is little respite from the fray of this greasy gaze, slick eyed dicks and sickly lenses littering every map. Breathless voyeurs and their remote kin making hay with their obsessive limits as the days are shaped by action and its inverse. Smiles slick with glistening viscera upon souls only able to feel by first looking at the Joneses, the old plodding hierarchy of monkeys seen and done the only thinking humans really do. Swim with the current as the river transforms from rapids to waterfalls. As of this writing TLC’s prophecies remain largely ignored.

pretty bad

The times find their note from the tuning fork of the unkind, leaving a sorry song to wonder after your mind. You can follow the directions, you can read the instructions aloud, your train of thought left to rattle the rails to hell or heaven. There’s still the sounds of the street through the window, plastic wheels dragging over grass and gravel, traffic growling in the distance as the wind lays it on thick. Some rumble from someone’s speakers, some dying of someone’s dreams, the wait for rain and some essay’s theme. Nobody sleeps anymore, they just drink until they drown or smoke until they float. Only bad actors and missed boats, and everywhere the sound of cages and rage.

The calendar continues the conceit as the days dwindle, the past piling on as the future evaporates into sighs and furies and falling leaves. Stacks of books and peanut shells and last century’s stains. Wheelchairs hunched with dust and absence, the sun stippled seas and every measure of never. Bullets for wishes and crow weighted boughs now lighter for the trope of flight. Black wings and broken mirrors and spent luck all nestled in cradles and coffins. Despite all your beliefs and fool heavy philosophies causality ends in casualties. There will be a fall you will not get up from.

The punch lines all come with bruises, the promises with caveats and a shit ton of small print. It’s the cudgeling I won’t recover from, I have fallen and I can’t get up. The hangman’s handiwork lingers like a lure, the gape of the rope the zero sum and the punctuation time served delivers. No comfort to the creatures left in neglect, no consolation to the heart’s prize. Eyes closed in resignation, hands bound in infirmity, the sparrow’s flight says it all. Dirt and damnation and a line from some show you don’t know. “A fate worse than a fate worse than death? Pretty bad.”