We rock around the clock to find the prohibition fresh on the lips, neither pickle nor motor sickle be. We burn and fade and are by fate waylaid, both the algorithm and the instrument, the climb to the precipice and the rhetoric of the long talk down. Our rubric and our declamations as we drain and dwindle. All the possibilities missed and the kingdoms built in their absence. The gospel of the road untaken, the miracles of these unwritten lives as memory turns to dust. The story we adhere to until the story falls apart.
The artifacts are resolute, shirts or skins and the worlds within. The mirror another corridor, memory the needle sting and the flash of teeth. Footsteps echoing in the stairwell, the crowded sounds of lonesome places, the odd accompaniment of the assembled ensemble of the self. I move from room to room. I shift from chair to chair, propped up on an elbow or a folding of pillows upon my restless bed. The sifting of the aches and the counting of the frames, the straining and the story, the motions and the form. Slowly the assertions grow more emphatic as the facts start losing face. From spark to sizzle, to smoke and fizzle, the dwindle only grows.
Would that it was seared on the streak of the star’s fall. Would that it was carried on insistent breath and dandelion seeds, the wish astride the wind. Instead it’s the stiff joints and bent back of the daily parade. Old wounds that won’t stop singing no matter how much medicine they take. Bruises woven into the words we use to soothe ourselves. The resolution slips and strays. Falling from such proud footing, the gibbering fool resplendent in their crown. The lights all snuffed at once, a whimper after all.