It falls on the wrong side of the reckoning. It misses the point of the illustration, this stifling ever after, this stunned same old song. The day ran me ragged, the night leans in to make sure it hurts. The slow unfurling of these boundless banners, the victories and the celebrations as the earth swallows light and shadow, left to the devices of the world that’ll have me. The heavy hush between the reach of music and that damned absent star, this hungry silence stirring limbs and skin. Written wrong, and everybody plays along. Written wrong, and no one bothers reading.
There’s no getting around it, hard truths and gray givens, the lonesome portion and the relentless night. Rejection and abandonment and these years without. The mind goes where the body allows, meat and the sedimentary soul. The mind is the watched pot at a boil. You fall and fall, and eventually no one offers a hand or takes a knee. It takes a while, but the world will tell you what you are. I do not recommend it.
The songs play on, the words go astray, your name becomes invective and epithet. You pace the cage, you walk in circles, turning with the merciless earth. Months without become years, possibilities fade, you learn to live with the stench of self and the lack of context. You begin to watch the sky and seasons because even though they don’t want you, they don’t want anyone. Gone so wrong for so damn long there’s nothing left but this nothingness, hard days and troubled nights and no return ticket to be found. Another one for the record, another longed for last.
