Grey Suit Black Tie

Fits and Rhythms

They took my leg, snapped thirty-one years off at the base. I could see the smoke billowing out my veins. It streamed, not like the blood from my lungs that I choked up at the sight. No use in wrapping. I just shook against the concrete with the sun was six feet further than it ever was before. Breeze brushing in the blood, the rest of me flailing. And I used to be the fastest man alive. We heave through, I fade and choke out. Fell down the steps in fits and rhythms to the sounds of their distant gallops in the forest. Somehow they found a path, cobbled together by a blurred soldier or some ponce de leon trying to get his name on a map. But it isn’t explorers, it’s the mapmakers who name things and it is time better spent locking yourself in a cottage, trying to learn calligraphy and drawing compasses the corners. Remember building barracks in the mud and hoping they wouldn’t slide into the ocean? Or measuring the sands on the shore? I said, I swore, you are the one I’ll spend my last moments reaching for the light. Why couldn’t we speak?