𝔅

And the cigarette butts collect in the pockets of my coats and of my jeans.

My pants fit more loosely;

My skin feels more like rubber bands wrapped around my bones.

Coffee is the only thing I can taste, and it tastes like iodine.

I feel colder, I feel far away, I feel like a crater where the earth has been churned up and displaced.

They’ve been digging up the gas lines from under the streets, you know.

Cutting deep, linear valleys into the mysterious red clay beneath the tar.

I imagine sinking through those gas lines,

Through that red clay,

Deeper and hotter and redder

And further and further removed

From the surface of the cities and the surface of myself.

No more cigarette butts in my mouth or grey dirt in my blood;

Just my naked skin against the red clay,