It’s a hard road down to the bitter end. Either sudden bumps or unpatched holes to bust an axle or blow a tire, the dings and dents accumulate until all that’s left is the wreck. Eventually even the rest stops offer little respite, a pause to let the engine cool, a moment to get the sun out of your eyes. The circles paced looking for a signal, the streets repeating as you hunt for the entrance ramp. Always a stranger when you finally arrive, you get to where no one knows you or wants to any longer. The path you took like a stone pressed into the palm of your open hand, some meaning that you missed, kissed goodbye then never kissed again. Home no longer home, enemies that scatter like rats, the static behind your eyes and the lies that never leave you alone.
The hours now only fit for longing, your pointless labors having taken your life and limb, forgotten heavens and stars that will never look you in the eyes. From the days of phone calls and letters to the age of no one talks anymore, the long shadows stretch in this twilight time, the warnings of the wise and the ways of the ancestor surrendered for the con so clumsy it couldn’t have survived natural selection. The world you built of debt and gilt succumbed to the machinations of the ceaseless tide. Sand swallowed by the insatiable oceans, humans forever out of their depths. You check your watch only to find your wrist, as naked and humble as the dead come judgement day.
Midnight draws near in your cheap room and threadbare vestments, a lonely light and the songs of the dead. Loved once and renounced, pound for pound and ounce for ounce never the contender, your hearts contentions all have met their proofs. Obsolete and unforgivable, pointless and savage and rejected by all the days to come, you wonder after the one that came in ones or twos, the fury of devotion and then the wall scrawled with sign. Strays and rats and spiders the only company that will keep you, you run the scenarios again and again. Tomorrow won’t have you and even the past has left you behind. You sit and stare, music from somewhere wandering by, staring at the pictures painted and the photos taken. Old and useless, left to the comforts of certain death and the drifts of dust.