And it’s all so heavy.  Burden of mine embedded.  It sticks like a low spring evening in Georgia, suffocating, full of old ghosts and drab speech.  There’s cheese-wire cutting through my muscles, fire ants in my bones.  Worms eating my guts, spiders behind my eyes.  Noises so loud it is the earth sundering, no, the collapsing of a star. Heavy.  My heart is on fire and my mind blanketed by winter snow.  I have been crucified but unlike the saviour, I cannot die.  Moving into a half-waking stupor.  I engage in the act of living, but it is a poor performance.  I am a MUFON case file, unexplained enigmas, Marfa lights.  If you want to know what pain is, look my way.  I know what pain is for pain is me.  So blind from the light that I cannot see.  Funny thing about pain, it is an invisible,  sly demon.  There is no way to truly know, so no one does.  A charlatan, a mad hatter, a fake, a loser.  All of these things I hear in whispers and eventually they begin to sound true.  Heavy.  It’s a slow, snaking sibilance the cracking and breaking of a mind, the murder of a soul.  I lose a little more to the war I fight with myself everyday.  The only way out is down, to sleep in the ground, where there are no sounds.  Some days I am a whiny bitch.  Others I am befuddled.  Too few of the days I am a good father.  Most I trudge on the happy road of destiny, with furrowed brow and unsure footing.  It is difficult to be a good soldier and suffer in silence when the hurt is so fucking loud.  Dig deep and find it all.  It’s heavier toward the end.  The slow fading of a man.  Soon I will become translucent.  The memory of me will fall away, and the only thing anyone will recall is pain(ha ha), and the pull of my lost soul.  Dwindle, and become less.  It is becoming of the conflict I think.  Poetic tragedy for the Greek and the meek.  I know, now.  I face the eater and laugh, and all of it is heavy with the stain of the everdark.  I stand and acknowledge my anathema.  Me.

image courtesy of Pinterest and Rene Burri, the burial of the poet Henri Cartier-Bresson 1952