ample standoff with an apple's inevitable path and our hopes to intercept or intercede or outcompete the critters coming or those that can climb and maybe already beat us to it, or the meltdown of freezing and refreezing but never staying, we've got a limited window, we peek outside and consider if today we fulfill our unenviable oath, have named ourselves and tied fates inadvisably, underestimated how we'd want to worm-out

cataclysm wishes to make a statement, waits for hubbub to die down but no one's around to hear, words are sounds bouncing off surfaces which no longer have an ear for it

find we could be indelibly inelegant, though we've got these little feet we bleat and stampede and see then macerate the map, a riled pile of harder-than-average steps sure will make a mess of things necessarily, maybe intentionally, maybe with no capacity or tolerance for regret, maybe we've thought about this and what's coming

laboriously we love and are better at the labor so it'll have to take precedence, give us exertional necessity that'll sink its teeth in and ride out the bleeding-dry, are appreciative of questing ticks because we just don't have that kind of ambition but are happy to act on behalf of damn-near anyone who does, including those as damnable as you, we're fatted calves and engorged quads designed to locomote for someone who's got somewhere to go or a reason to do it, neither of which we can comprehend, but body-systems keep sending what's necessary to make the mechanisms go so we're for hire, we're purposeless and lock eyes with and are amenable to the end-goal or eventual outcome of whoever we can do some good

air unsuitable to consume, you human or impress your best simulacrum, make the mouthings of, hold sounds at the end of a lever and see them waggle and warble and be sort of but not exactly words and worse for wear, be air's vibrational circus, third traveling extravaganza this week, be weak and eek!-ing when inputs give the signal, eke appealing chemical-benefits of following along, have an oblong system where a supposed sphere had to squeeze through, excuse or bless you at the exits, not a lot of respiratory excesses around here can be endured for long, so you take a run at it

a reprieve from the dream-team, we wake and ache all over, hover in the vicinity seeing if we can remember, defeating the point of attempted reprieve

calliopes competing hubbubiously and we with lurching hearts attend the clownery, were a lot canvassed-over supposedly for a limited time but find the song can circle forever

Unspeakably eking, we do find subsistence but it isn't pretty.

Hatchling having broken-out hungry finds dad hungry also and who eats who is a piss-poor contest.

Polysomnogram warbles in the smog, waits and sees what morning mists indicate and how we take them.

A bit of aberrant weather and a witch right there and we weren't meant to wonder? Thunder doesn't let us linger long.

Weren't you on-board or of use as added mass when some witch hucked a building with her mind to squish her competitor then levitated nearby in nonchalance with an entrance planned to greet you and wonder at the coincidence of it all, acknowledging no hand in it or how you'd been used, skewer of the conversation to star you and what you must do in the aftermath?

static crackling en route, minuscule offshoots of light not capable of the nonchalant slow-mo of tendrils, nothing about us knowing how to grow. Earth is spurious, sparrows narrow on us, all our granite substrate is plagued with cracks which brim with the stuff of slugs, which we lug with us just in case.

higgledy-piggledy wiggler has had this and that skin and skeletal accoutrement and all the connecting fascia and the lesser surroundings to pivot and wriggle inside a pocket of inertia so that all that restlessness won't shake orbit too fast, won't shimmy off all matter all at once, mass gathered for just such a slowing, necessary, what has stuck will require careful undoing which we were not innately prone toward

no two ways about to collide, only it coinciding that they coincide and we do too, that things are multiple ways and we're astir with it and possibly not at all otherwise

going back into the hard place to make the hard place less hard knowing that it won't be, owing it undeliverable comeuppance or all the psychopomp we can offer

grief's egregious greases slick-up the amulet so no oxidizing forces can undo an iota or friction rip bits off even minusculely, no rust or weather is gonna shuck our grief which we are easy with, have daily, are duly-appointed to and anointed in the stuff so much we now produce and harvest it and there's enough to be gleaned thereafter, gleaming, shimmering sheen's iridescence with its scent and essence thick in the sinuses of any vaguely sad passersby or those we could sway and we ooze and lose no sleep, shed and spread it, propagating mechanisms making no incline possible, we have one direction we can fall and all falls under this one rule, keep talismans and charms and sigils in its honor because inevitably someone wants some merch and we grease each to offload the excess which will otherwise see us sunk