Bone Crush

I remember my first kiss mostly because I didn’t want it but he did and so I decided I had no choice, which is right there where the sickness flowers and lives inside of you like a low grade fever forever. Or until you claim it, beat it back. Pin its wings and place it in a jar on a shelf in a room you refuse to enter ever again which makes things tricky because the room is in the haunted house that is you. Lips and fingers, bodies and doors. You learn ways to unlearn yourself in the hopes you will one day disappear. It’s all an act, of course, nobody really wants to be erased or at least I can’t imagine life would want life to live that way, but God’s a train run off the tracks of your bones long ago.

There is a hollowness which has become sacred to you and you could swear it smells like home, its vacancy warm as fireglow, like magic, like a secret you have to keep to protect yourself and those around you from seeing you as you really are. What if you have claws instead of wings, or worse what if you have both. Human love is only as enchanting as humanity can be and so much tenderness has sunk into the angry sea as it is, along with the toxins and residue of apathy and gloom.

As I make my way up a hill which cuts through and along a small old cemetery, my heavy boots push the colorful bed of leaves around in the dirt. When the wind presses against me in earnest, I pull up the collar of my wool coat, light a cigarette and blow smoke high into the autumn air, it billows and swirls against the pink sunset sky. In my mind, almost adorable in its seemingly endless capacity for delusion, I am Camus and my entire life is lived out minute by minute, frame by frame, in grainy black and white. Meme culture. Counter culture. Noir and scotch. Cults of personality. The fetish of annihilation.

The clouds this evening are absolutely wicked, so deeply gray they nearly blackout the already fading electric rays of auburn light. I think about the woman with the rich auburn hair online modeling fine lingerie, her perfect ivory skin, curves like waves on a glistening ocean, eyes like crystal blue heaven. I think about the philosophers and poets who have come before us and the tiny slivers of wisdom they have handed on to us like passing notes through the invisible veil, taking swipes at meaning, dangling enlightenment in front of us like it was hung on a rope.

It’s all an act, of course. Every single move we make and breath we take, an act of surrender, desperation, hope, absurdity. Acting like we have any kind of control, the mass of all the universe spinning in circles in our tiny hands. Acting like we would know ourselves if we ever dared to meet ourselves at all.