I suppose I could go from ache to ache striving down the line, like Santa’s reindeer or Snow White’s dwarfs, listing all the parts that ended up in pieces or begrudging every moment from birth on downhill. I guess it could be the sound of rain flooding the gutters and soaking the roofs, the only talk on the television, the only music stuck in my throat. The litany my identity, it slides along the black ice of circumstance, the gathered collateral and the comedic impact of all those empty plans. A rictus grin stuck on my lips as I send some more smoke to heaven.
The mass accumulates, hollowed out intentions and the sparks fly from the friction, even the strange grows familiar. The arrow loosed toward the sky, the rest is threat and anticlimax. The numbers riot and roil around the permeable possible, the wise and the foolish all caught upon the arc of the tumbling dice, blessing and curse a single call. The fire spreads because the fire is always catching. We haul our reasons from the ruins.
The fire blazes, the fire flickers, the fire fades. This is the thread we are woven from, the text and textile, the world we are thinking through. A door in the dark where our strangers keep knocking, a scratching from behind the blinds, the night with every light left on. As tenacious as the shadow of water within the shadow of a glass, neither name nor act will last. The wheel in the commercial seems to spin backwards dragging along the limits of this instrument or that one. This continuity that only lasts while the camera is on. This name that only lasts while it’s spoken.