Built to Break

This venom tastes old and stale, the remnants of a toxin brewed long before us.  In brightly green glowing barrels they roll it down the waterfront piers into the tossing waters.  Like a storm at sea, we intensify until we hit land.  We dissipate over the waterlogged countryside, falling our separate ways.  We’ll rondezvous back at the ocean, and we’ll wear our finest, both in fighting trim.

I don’t stay long in the pitch black, somewhat sure that to stay is to become part of it.  I go back, though, if only to relearn what that place is like.  I check my eyeballs at the door and tear down the retaining walls around my heart.  Wise?  Of course not.  Holy?  Naturally.  Come, join me, and I’ll tie our tubes into some inextricable tangle.  You’ll never escape this bloody, knotted mess.

Have you half a mind to lend?  I hadn’t thought to gather all my wits until I’d reached wit’s end.  Now I dangle here, a tenuous grasp on a single thread of sanity, aware nominally that fragile things are built to break.  How long can we hold this thing up to our hearts?  Surely as long, or longer, than a sane man dares.  This remains the definition of a good thing, and I won’t allow it exposing itself to the typhoon element.

The calender confronts me questioningly.  Have you prepared?  Was 21 years enough?  I think so, and I am slowly defusing my heart in preparation for a gentle landing.  Such time bombs belong nowhere on land, ticking so belligerantly on a massive, balmy coast.  The Great Lakes bemoan my passing, but they recall the good times we had, and don’t begrudge a nascent, blooming love of longer shores.  Michigan, I’ll miss you.  Hold a wet embrace for bolder lads.

I passed high over the Great Plains, a faint face in a cumulous cloud.  I will fall, I think, back on my childhood home.  I’ll disintegrate in a shower of cathartic tears, an entity slowly dying over America’s Dairyland.  Oh, how we’ll miss the coast.  But what does it mean?

We succumb to these intermittent thoughts of utter confusion, when nothing has value to base anything else off of.  You understand?  And a lack of measurement becomes a precursor to paralysis.  Everything takes its value from anything else, except for one thing, and this one thing sits high above the economic mess.  Opportunity cost and all the buzz words, all the hoity-toity razzmatazz that has put longer attention spans to sleep.  How sleep sounds repugnant now.

Swaddled in the night, these matching incunabula feel right.  How your little hand must feel when putting the car in drive, a vehicle in love with the other side of the mountain.  Go around.  Take the scenic route.  Some truths live languid and patient, proof-positive that we do exist, and they’re perched, preening themselves on an outcropping and staring down at us all.  You understand?  I understand few things these days, as experience spitefully disproves the facts I’d gathered to myself.  This must be gathered to myself.

Have you ever melted in the hot summer sun, aware that the puddles you create were meant to be stomped in?  To flow steadily down a gutter, all in preparation to be washed out to sea?  I slowly wait for the evaporation, desperately swimming against the concrete conduits that forcefully drag me towards cast iron grate.  But what does it mean?

I built a diorama out of real life in my mind, delicately inserting myself into a particular setting.  A particular place and time.  The popsicle stick fence in the backyard rots in the baking sun.  The paper fridge fell into disrepair quite awhile ago.  The single beds with single people lost meaning sometime between loneliness and discovery.

Am I a writer, or a gardener, or a historian?  A teacher or a student?  Something unsalvagably inbetween, I imagine.  Predestined to mourn my destiny, determined to believe in predetermination and my own hubris.  This isn’t confliction or ambivalence or self-defeat, it’s the natural progression of a mind slowly uncovering itself and finding itself lacking.  I know what I am and what I’ve been; I don’t know what I will be.  Predestined for peculiarity.  Or convinced of my own peculiarity.  I think I know I love everything a little too much.  At the very least, I’m still finding out.

Before I go to bed, I check the closet for clothes to wear and monsters to scare.  I brush my hair with a yellowed, smallish hand out of my eyes.  I stop to quietlly pray for queens to have no qualm with me.  I’ve no qualm worth speaking, besides that I’m leaking something inside my head.  You know it?  I show it, all red behind the green that represents the innermost parts of this mystery, a random slideshow of misery and miserly history.  Can this be changed?  This deranged habit I’ve lost already, given away to neighbors and despised traitors as I move on to the after, a new chapter of prideful laughter to echo up the coast with the most with the hostess.  A smile for awhile.  It’s all I’ve got, so why not?

I used to take more pride in living above this.  I’d learned to envy the people living far below.

I met a muddled, muddied mess of a man

Out near where the powerlines end

And the train tracks begin.  He sat silently,

Portentously, a hidden tempest hinting

At terrible things.  I sat next to him, listening:

"I don’t want to die, I don’t want to live,

I want to coexist with the emptiness.

You follow?  This hollow chest hasn’t

Been filled with anything but promises."

Easy/Lucky/Free by Bright Eyes

Did it all get real, I guess it’s real enough
They got refrigerators full of blood
Another century spent pointing guns
At anything that moves
Sometimes I worry that I’ve lost the plot
My twitching muscles tease my flippant thoughts
I never really dreamed of heaven much
Until we put him in the ground

But it’s all I’m doing now
Listening for patterns in the sound
Of an endless static sea
But once the satellite’s deceased
It blows like garbage through the streets
Of the night sky to infinity

But don’t you weep (don’t you weep for them)
Don’t you weep (don’t you weep)
There is nothing as lucky
Honey, don’t you weep (don’t you weep for them)
Don’t you weep (don’t you weep)
There is nothing as lucky, as easy, or free

Don’t be a criminal in this police state
You better shop and eat and procreate
You got vacation days then you might escape
To a condo on the coast

I set my watch to the atomic clock
I hear the crowd count down til the bomb gets dropped
I always figured there’d be time enough
I never let it get me down

But I can’t help it now
Looking for faces in the clouds
I got some friends I barely see
But we’re all planning to meet
We’ll lay in bags as dead as leaves
All together for eternity

But don’t you weep (don’t you weep for them)
D

on’t you weep (don’t you weep)
There is no one as lucky
Honey, don’t you weep (don’t you weep for them)
Don’t you weep (don’t you weep)
There is nothing as lucky, as easy, or free
Or free, or free, or free
There’s nothing, there’s nothing, there’s nothing…