… and, yes, I’m turning to oil as we speak.  Traversing the decline, alone in the crowd, I pause to look back… perhaps planning a retreat.

 

But no… I plunge boldly in with the rest.

 

The dust has settled in mountains over love.  We are not good men… we are naked men, infants basking in our shamefulness. We aren’t sorry for our weaknesses, our stupidities.  We are a pastiche of clichés.  In this ocean, my body sinks.  My mind, drunk with an adrenaline cortisol cocktail, is telling me to shit or get out of the water.

 

We taught our world to hate us as much as we hate ourselves.  This has been our life’s work?

 

Our hearts are full of splinters and noise.

Our minds leaden.

Falling down.  Falling down.

We are turning into oil.

 

All we are is oil.

 

With bones growing old, we walk the treadmill… and the shit feels so deep as it sucks our legs.  Someone will kill us if they see us for who we are; running fast, we hide in plain sight.  Now we’re caught in our own snares…  Didn’t we just know it all?  For years we watched those around us drown, feeling as superior as athletes among cripples  We threw them our cement life-savers: we offered them our clutching and sharpened talons.  We got them hooked on our junk.  We were all things to all peoples: friends with agendas, loan sharks, pervy uncles… we gave what we had… everything and more.  Now, as the scales tip again, we’re crippled beyond our most heated dreams, deformed by our wildest nightmares.  We wake with fear in the night like shell-shocked soldiers to the sound of glasses shattering on the floor.  We, too, are being shattered.  Slowly.  Very slowly.

 

 

Give it to us.

We want.  We want.  We have a right.

Give it.

 

Gotta go… gotta go.

 

Return to turn around

again and again

turn around.

Flip off the stilts,

fall  down.

Down.

With no end, down .

 

As the fragments and dust settle,

and the horizon clears below,

I become aware that we’re hanging

by a collective neck

from a rope in

the sky…

 

and I’m smiling.

I smile,

teeth first into the sun.

 

Sooner than we imagined, we’ll be free.

We’ll be done.