Snake ropes operate as vines around an estate.
Inflicted are the faults.
Inflicted are the flaws.
Strange, the way disease becomes our medicine,
diagnosed in scribbled notes and urges for the masochist,
embroiled as we come to be in the fiction of reality.
To find screaming solitude in crowded rooms;
boundless exile read between the lines of forced empathy.
Without a day to live in the shoes of another,
how quickly it comes to be that we reduce ourselves to atrophy
in a seduction by a remedy conflated with the irony:
That which is held behind the shield is what plans the fatal wound.
That which is ignored in the unspeakable clatter of bottles.
Is it inadequacy that plagues the mutual condition of predetermined graves?
Swerving memories collide into the present reel;
trauma’s swinging wild in the blurs of trust and liars,
where all the same are reduced to those to bear the blame.
Is it the guilt of the survivor, clutching to reminders,
collecting cuts from a paper trail of marked wrists and circled calendar dates?
Inflicted are the drifters,
abound in life, placed in a mind unaware,
seeing only the passing glimmer of the model citizen,
losing sight of the dim interiors where the paint peels at the edges,
presenting a structure splintered at the hinges.
What more but another day losing to the struggle,
time blended under moon and sun as if neither rose or fell.
Shifting weather forgets the fair friend under a depleted atmosphere
where clouds are the sky’s absolutes,
and the ebb and flow from rising to sleeping comes only in resolute grey.
Among us all are we all that see the absolute alone,
steadfast in the worry of showing too deep into the bone
where the sad secret of holding on to tomorrow is but a thread of marrow.
To navigate by a landmine society,
it seems strange when the explosions resonate;
a shockwave per decimal shaved off,
concealed in black dresses and shuffled eulogies,
prayed away until another wanderer is pushed to demise.
It bites until being is consumed.
The urge astounds until it crystallizes in weariness,
uncomfortably understood,
betting seconds away as a clock’s hands unceremoniously expire,
as we all find ourselves out of time eventually.
~
( ❤ Mitch)
