My steps do falter though not in fear, my hands do tremble but not in awe, the ride having grown rougher and rougher in the vehicle of birth over the latest years of discouragement. The vessel struggles and staggers through the day to day, peals of pain and the quickening deterioration, dread set into the algorithm and the old OS. The plummet into isolation and the scales that don’t wait, a hole burning through my belly, and a soul that can’t be found. Security lights blink on as traffic passes, Christmas lights shimmering, and a moon too true to look at without it hurting. It’s a little lovely, and a little sad, but I’d rather not all the same.

So it’s pretty little rings around the moon, a dance of daisy chains holding hands with the reaching rain, a whisper of the crisp Pacific drawn along the storm. Some song towards the continuity as the collateral does more than its part, that hallowed and gravid moon a tug on the tangle knotted with witness, a trick of smoke mirror and magic in the impact of this gush of night. The rain strings beads through the bare limbed silhouette sprawled above the yard, this rooted reach toward another day, life can take or leave me. The needle passing through the flesh, the burden all mortal stakes and worded purpose.

The deal is you never quite get it right. The deal is you circle something close and quick, your eye all kinds of prized. The days go by, rubbed wrong raw by the obdurate scour of aimless repetition. The words rise to the surface as we breathe deep and dive down, some bitter linger between heart and tongue, breath not the last thing held. Neither the tumbled tricks of thinking quick, fetish and effigy chasing what purchase the pull of the moon shares with these waves of rain. Brick and board, and the cold settles into the story of meat and bone. Name lost to speech, this terminal spill of the time and its telling, aware at the end of the confession I believed neither in intercessors or sin. Adding to the distraction with the alphabet, the structure left of the conflagration, a smolder or a spark.