Tag: Dirty Realism

The darkness slipped inside me
 at the end of a knotted winter scarf
  slung over the dilapidated door of a
   hotel room. 

There swung the jerking feet of my
 hopes for faith, love, brotherhood and
  a well adjusted childhood. 

It took me decades to understand
 that you can't change the shifting
  hands of Fate, much less the accidental
    slip of the foot.

The sky is grey,
pressing down on me,
always pressing down
into that hollow cavity
where my heart should be. 

The muscle and sinew
still there, of course, 
useful only to keep time.
It does that well, at least,
better than a Rolex.

There's a void at the center of my being. 
          I don't mean my heart.
I mean a pillar, as if God drilled out the
           core of me,
Some glorified test tube surrounded by flesh.
           It's not comfortable, 
But I admit it's a good place to store baggage. 

Time crawls during an episode,
 the days and nights extending
  before you; a vanishing horizon. 

You begin to take notice of little
 things; the exact rhythm of your heart,
  the way a water droplet holds light.

But mostly I sit in the stillness
 of apathy, stagnate as everything around
  me grows and changes while I molder. 

It's happened enough times for me
 to know that it's all a matter of time
  before it passes. 

So I sit, and smoke, and drink
  black coffee and wait until 
   the light returns. 

Buried beneath the 
raw flesh of every scar 
there lies a story, a veiled 
truth manifested in the physical form. 

If you listen 
close enough they will
whisper, confessing our sins, 
our triumphs, our follies and, even, 
                                our secrets.