Shine all you want sun, you still won’t touch me. Pray all you want, the blessings won’t bend the will of the world. The wind rises, the ache expounds upon its thesis, pain the way flesh navigates the music of the spheres. I don’t say, and no ones asking. Just the clock and the calendar playing telephone pole as the train pulls away. Flipping through the pages so the figures seem to move. Progress another way to record the rate of decay, this heart counted out in the time of there will be no other. Even the muses know I was never worth the words.
There is nothing here but the vagaries of leaf and wind. Nothing but the relentless passage and the portal to hell. Just distraction and mitigation, and not a thing to say. Stretch the words across the wounds, fill the blank pages with inklings and itches scratched, just a fuse without a match. Just a wheel with nowhere to turn. The nights are a grind, the days are spent. Ten thousand ways I miss the mark, the darkness and the lost spark, the constant of the world working the wounds and all my time apart or alone. Come home to be whittled away by the burdensome blood and the wrongs I can’t get around. Come home to play out some role they needed filled so they could keep running amok and going astray.
I don’t pretend that it isn’t all my own doing. I can’t say I don’t deserve every lick and clout. The chemistry and the cage, the ruckus and the rage, there is no one to blame but me. I have nothing to offer, but that doesn’t stop them from asking. I have nothing to say, but I cannot shut up about it. I am only tolerated, I am only suffered, an object lesson to drape in pity and contempt. The water always wins, but only after whole generations of waves are broken upon the stubborn rocks. Obdurate and intolerable, I hold any line I stand upon. A calamity sitting and smoking, waiting for this sickness to at long last end. The beautiful blue flecked with green and gold, I grow ugly and old, waiting for the end I asked for. Tired of being poison to the ones that claim to love. Tired of being pummeled and hearing about how I broke their bones.