It will be a spectacular shipwreck.
You enter twilight with your heart oozing coffee and single malt, tittering on the edge of aneurysms bursting, bursting riotously to the pulse of stars beating, beating like drums.
Returning nightly to a vacant den dining on an expensive takeout meal for one. Mock me if you will. You say to them. My vomit is your rent.
You still carry the guilt from your last vacation.
But you’re not there yet, and there’s no glory to a smoking pile of ashes without recompense.
You’re missing the point.
At the end of ends what matters in life is with whom you spend it,
In the end, bones will rot, and all your accolades will turn to dust, but those whom you hold dear will make this tepid middling life sparkle.
You have seen the sparkle.
Aye. Felt it too, at times.
Shimmering lights at the tip of a wing. It fluttered away in the long, long ago of yesterday.
And it has left you falling, falling.
But this was what you wanted –
the wish, the dream, the spaces in between, where the thing you were and the thing you hoped to be meld into a tangle of faces.
You wake up at night looking into its eyes, glinting; keeps the embers in your guts shivering – shivering –
like starlight, or is it just froth and bubbles born of the Whale and the lice that fed Him,
and the critters that creeped between pickled stars and rusted moons to escape Him,
and the mighty crab, clad in diamond shells, riding on a thousand fluttering wings, tearing through the folds of time to evade Him?
All at once you are timid, wearied, frenzied, and broken.
Today you’re old. Clock hand cricked past morning and left a trail of soiled brains in its wake. You’re buried at noon, beneath rotten flowers next to that old tree. Worms will keep you company.
And you still have other stifled dreams kept folded and pressed beneath your pillow, words faded.
All these years of mania have made you hollow.
This,
now,
your life,
crumpled and yellowed.
In and out of your withered heart, vapid, here –
#00117F 