Run

Close your eyes. Can you hear the night outside screaming your name in faint whisper–from somewhere behind a billion exploding stars. Where hidden murmurs tremble the cold still. Planets spin slowly and silently reserved and partially prurient–but not as we are, in their divine arrogance dormant and whirring like massive gears turning and doing an unappreciated job.

 

Inhale deeply. Allow the rust of a million machines to sing to you, O death, and the demise you are. Humming and cymballing like falling pebbles on a brass countenance, an Egyptian sweaty fever dream atop a pyramid while beetles cook far down below in the indignation of an ancient sun. Our creations die without complaint, and it pains the brain to miss the point. Perhaps we have created better versions of ourselves.

 

Now, with a soft exhale, bite into your lower lip…hard…now harder. No–keep biting. Harder still. Break the skin…there. Taste the blood, the river Styx, the iron stream, the scarlet ribbon that ruins the certain skepticism married to any form of sanctity. If a mirror be near you, approach it and smile. Nestled in your teeth, there amid the row of tiny walls, where soldiers squeeze right through and crawl above each other in hope, of their own Helen.

 

 

You see walls around you, in the very spot where albino peacocks stood still, and men murdered muses, soft weapons didn’t see the sun, the zest was yet to be born that rode the zephyr calmly, and babies were bludgeoned for a chance, if a mere one, to be heard by gods created–in wood, in mud, in stone, in crowds or the madness of the alone.

 

Run.  Run.  Run.

 

To home, to turn to stone, to fall within the fault, and crushed by a behemoth pillar of salt, to fuck the angels inside, to let our daughters drain you with drink, to outgrow old clothes, to feel pain from simply waking up…

 

Run.    Run.      Run.

∞