i am the redress among the inapt. i am the crutch of emotion. i am the fire beneath your face. i am the rushed wine and how's the salad on the plate. i am the creaky floor beneath you. i am the faith in all that's good. i am the alcohol in your head. i am the anger you took to bed. i am the inconsiderate and the damned. i am the palate which has been skinned. i am the one up late tonight. i am the body crouched over right. i am the harvesters sickle. i am hardly softer thistle. i am the blade upon your skin. i am the cut which is to begin. i am the seed planted deep. i am perpetual winters weep. i am pantry hidden sweets. i am your urge not to miss a beat. i am the fringe that covers your eyes. i am an old dog who hid away to die. i am the ghost of christmas past. i am bones made from wax. i am the memories you left alone. i am a world unto its own.

i am the building. i am the lost, then reached, then found.

let go.

surreptitious {the outlining of an old man (yet to be named) in a story (yet to be written)}

An old man's two hands hardly ever moved, both of them quietly expressive when he seldom spoke, yet habitually they out ranked his voice. His articulations held a diminished kind of eloquence that recollected certain impressions of slow molasses and whispers hushed by ages of broken reverie. He fathered four, grandfathered seventeen, and had seen fifty three years of marriage, learned in the practice of burying trivial quarrels with any and all. The town gossips often spoke of him as congenial, while the saloon men named him gregarious by birth, as his father before him, too, was of quiet and friendly disposition. While he was a boy the dust bowl came and went, as did the second Great War, and he grew into manhood having nothing but red dirt to fill his pockets and only a spirit of longevity to keep his mind afloat. Picture shows cost a nickel and automobiles became widely accessible without regard to the small farmer or the horse and wagon salesman. When he was only six the farm house in which he lived burned to the ground while he and the rest of his family watched their meager effects turn to an ash deeper than the moonless nights of autumn. With hardly an education, he knew of presidents as names written in books he could not afford and as voices on radios he did not have. He knew of Europe as a place which needed rebuilding, Asia as a continent of wild and curious tendencies, Russia as the bed of communistic evil, South America a wealth of mountainous mystery, and Antarctica as a place of snow and sea lions.

When he turned twenty five he gave up a habit of smoking cigarettes (attained by working railroad track-laying gangs) for the sweet and more sophisticated taste of pipe tobacco. When offered a drink, he preferred scotch or red wine, though never refused nor drank with a grimace what he was given. He loved fishing, and as a prank on a job connecting the Pacific to the Atlantic, tie by greasy tie, a few friends in charge of dynamiting managed one sunny day to explode a hundred uncountable fish out of a pond where he was enjoying his lunch. This memory forever made him laugh, especially when his wife burned fish in the oven.

Ad infinitum...

stacking up coffins along the tracks

Between not behind and barely
fucked
where fragility doth yelp for
covers.
cries costly nostalgias of
lovers
who buried rage with their
daughters
slain by conflict in other times
barren
toppled on a spirit of quiet
hardly
jagged edged faith in obscured
piles
staring and staring and staring
always
discerning the meaning of naught
hardy
and foolish where we once laid down
epiphany
existential, nihilistic, backasswards
dead.

Doctors repeatedly told him he had a slow heartbeat, which would seem to give some insight to the man's disposition, but from the confusion he so often found in silence, to assume he had no real notion of letting up would not be far off. Only when faced with the enormous hardships that come with land - as mountains tended to stop ambitious explorers dead in their own tracks - could he find himself slowed (only by blunt force). He stared off the edge of said mountains, as if they would eventually succumb to humankind's presupposed stature as the most complex and versatile matter on earth.
Though one who interprets an arrogance over mountains into action has a much greater chance at defeat than he who sits and ogles his eyes over the rocks he will never walk, slow heartbeat and all, he was racing and flying over everything, only to be slowed by the land. It is so very easy to forget the land. It is so very hard to slow down. But failure defines everyone in some way or another, and to this effect we must pay respect to the land that clutches us all and brings us back to the life from whence we came. Fall back into land and fall back into the very core of sustenance. The spirit of solitude, or something like that. To feel the call of something wild, something wired into his sense of self. So when it caught him by the foot, he would slowly march through the fields of cotton and youth, under the shadow of the great Rockies which haunted his boyhood. He was to be slowed for the rest of however long it took. Slowed and slower still.

From my fingertips, nothing.

I have bled before and I will write until I cannot. I scrawl out most intimate passions and fictions, yet I sit staring into a pallid computer screen and my muse snows a deep white and deadpan. The keys are there, beneath my hands, and the screen before me blurs and disquiets. From my fingertips, nothing. The discord of mind and body does not howl into the night, but whimpers and turns to fog.
In this silence I find the plot of my grandfathers before me, tilling the soil and scratching the land. When everything in me falls quiet and snow starts drifting down onto my head, a great silence.
Before I had not listened. But silence inches into the cracks of self and calls attention to every ounce of wretchedness writhing in the bowels beneath the belly.

Tales of ancient renunciations echo off the brick and into the heart.

"Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις; respondebat illa: ἀποθανεῖν θέλω."

But I am no longer a coward. Take heart and fuck the rest. I have been given the handful of dust, and to what avail? I have walked among the dead at the violet hour when the eyes go black. I was he who put Death in chains. My hubris is a smug grin.
If I am wholly condemned to push the stone up the mountain only to descend and push it again, then so be it. Because I was condemned for unmitigated passion. For my scorn of the gods, my hatred of death, and my passion for life begs that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. I am not afraid. I am ready.

I hear everything in this silence and I lay my wretchedness before a bloody altar to imaginary gods. Jealous, hateful, putrid gods, readying their armies to keep men at bay, to keep human-kind afraid of their own shadows. But I live in the shadows. I love in the shadows. I am but a shadow.

In winter the locust do not call out their cedar songs, but sleep with the bears and the hearts of men. Christmas comes and glimmers and then a new year dawns, we bear our hopes and fears on the wings of angels who crave our blood. Jesus sleeps in his tomb.

I will not waver. I will not hesitate. I am the moonlight that haunts your window. I am all which you fear. So stand down and sheath your sword you ambitious war mongers. You have not felt the wrath of a man doomed to an eternity of nothingness. My anger cannot be contained.

Ad augusta per angusta, ad infinitum.