The thunder rumbled, the lightning flashed, the pit hid in the shower. The dawn broke hard, dappled droplets of rain and jags of electric flash and low roaring from on high. Strange for summer in California, at least as the old climate leanings go. The bedeviling heat, the shifting shoulders of the firmament, the prophesied trends coming true despite what you’ve been told. It is wearying, the maddening rise in heat as fate gifted me with all this labor, the lack of anything resembling help or support as the days melt into shades and sentiments. Wake in daylight, wake in night, sheets soaked dead broke and nothing landing right. A creature of habit with every habit all but demolished like an old fence struck by a motorcycle, the nights and days just wash over me. Everything is afoot as the world begins to buckle. They just keep beating and I won’t quite break. I’ve got nothing left, inside or out, but I can’t stop swinging back.
If it ever mattered, it doesn’t now. I move in slow circles, I empty buckets, I serve the meals. Guilt over missing my father’s dying and my mother’s broken hip drove into a corner that I knew I was unsuited for. My immunity to cognitive dissonance means I can’t paint it into pretty pictures. My life was a shitty zero even before I moved back to my hated hometown, when I absorbed abuse and shed my blood for twelve bucks an hour. One job where I didn’t fit to the next. Beats working I suppose. I wouldn’t know. I’ve never worked right, and it appears that there isn’t a fix that fits in this life. There isn’t much I want, and most of what it was is lost to me, lovers left and fields gone fallow. No one listens, and anyone who looks looks away pretty quick. Weaving fantasies with words seems pointless now, even if there were an audience, the imminent collapse of civilization suggests that my hat would be a little late to toss in. As for sticking to the facts, the market for that died on 9/11.
At least I didn’t have any children, the proffer goes. At least I didn’t marry any of the poor dazzling women I made miserable with my madness and affections. So the caveat to being terrible goes something like “at least you never managed to achieve any of the basic human comforts that you longed for, you monster.” They’re not wrong, these hypothetical people who speak to me the hard truths most folk have given up offering anymore. Friends have long left me behind, cutting their losses as they headed on for halcyon fields or fresh hells. Bite off a few heads, you find there are fewer advisors sticking their necks out. So the days burn on and bleed into one another. My world contracts in a vastly expanding universe, still beset by the gods and devils in my skull, and the murder apes that have always had the floor. I am beating concrete and brick the same sad futile way I tap away at these dumb dead words. Incessantly and impotently. Nothing new, just empty animal rituals in the vacant hours of this dying night. Nothing new, just teaching lessons to my bones that my head can’t quite learn.