sometimes your blood rings in your own years

 hard and loud enough

 for long enough

 that your feet move in indignation 

under the iron rings sedating them

 for so long -- for so long

 that you hardly recognize them

 for so long that everything else 

seems to break away, 

dragged forward into action now

 and if not now not ever, 

and it's like that forever.

 

our lives are full of ink and pictures,

 smiles and words and 

good intentions and 

and and and and

 (it's full of conjunctions at crossroads spanning out as idealistic rays in this way or that, but our vision of where they start and end is autocastratic)

 and

 the idea that it's enough

 permeates every pore of a skin

 stretched over the scarred mass

 of the collective human soul 

to the extent that these feet moving forward 

is the involuntary manifestation

 of every toxin we've ingested

 in vain 

to stave off for one more day

 just one more day

Just one more day 

( another day a year a lifetime maybe our children will fucking carry us into the ground maybe there's no room for punctuation this time because life 

doesn't have to try to be beautiful.)

 

sometimes it just happens, 

formlessly, listlessly, 

and with such an unfamiliar sting of betrayal to what we thought we knew that it's easy

 to treat it like a disease.

 

In fact, we are not diseased,

 just simply uneasy:

 restless and directionless 

being told from both ends of history 

how wrong we are 

through the umbilical cord. 

Two graphs tell us two different things and 

we're expected to have an answer by the time we're twenty. 

That answer has to last us 45 years

 until we're sent off to the glue factory,

 lost for the rest of our shelf lives

 before being recycled in the sacred soils

 of interred embrace, 

(indominus e patronus et spirit de sancti)

feeling more at home in a coffin

 than we ever did alive,

shaved and defeated,

 scraping our meager name in the brand of somebody else.

somebody greater 

digging for the self it's easy to be buried 

years before you'd ever find it .

 

To what exception are we made?

 

"zach is a great workhorse, but that's it."

yet here I am. 

Without the bit and bridle

 the world feels so much lighter,

 blinded without blinders 

to keep me on the safe and straight path 

set by stone masons a thousand years ago.

 'This is how it's always been'

 dictated by a dollar,

( because the world's currency is malcontented cider in the palms of men making shoes for spiders going barefoot

 to the promised land. earning fate in whisk ey and bitters-- THAT IS TO *SAY*, these visions are meany to be mirages along the way)

 

This is why we cling to storybooks from when we are young, 

because the light seems further 

and further away 

and we're programmed to live under magnifying glasses.

I wonder who's telling me, late at night in my own head

innthe safe haven for dreams, this:

"It's too late for me, but we'll see what can't be undone. There's still damage to do before they wrest the axe from my hands."