#sometimesitscozy

Someone has to leave first

That's always the issue isn't it? Doesn't matter if it's a phone call, a lunch date, a talk over a cup of coffee, divorce. or a death. One minute you're having a laugh, sharing a story, breathing the same air, and the next thing you know, you gotta go to work the next day, I gotta go to bed, I'm sorry i have a meeting to go to, my lunchbreak is over. Someone has to leave first.

You can spend your whole life with someone, some 40, 50 odd years, walk the same roads, share meals, beds, trips to the beach, the museum. You fill your house with pictures and promises, your favorite colours and all sorts of kitsch. You can entwine yourself as much as humanly possible, like two pea vines without a pole between ya, but someone has to leave first.

On the other hand, to want something is a different matter. Its a nice addition, it's a take it or leave it is the willingness to keep it around, that is to say that it is a choice. Sure there may be some burden in its acquisition or ots maintenence or its application but its something that you decide you is important enough to pursue it.

I want you.

You put your headphones on. Those dusty old monsters, wrecked with so much accumulated skin from audiolophiles long gone you'd have no trouble molding them back into a man. The ear covers are falling off and smell disarmingly like a hamster cage. It's become a ritual for you, that quiet bit of revulsion.

You turn the dial to hear the roar as you browse through a million variations on the same theme. A hissing and crackling if which for only a moment would yield to anything or anyone else would make its anger much more tangible. To mentally keep track of how many you've gone through you watch the needle eclipse the frequency lines. The tick marks on the dial mostly just unpainted grooves now dissolved away by generations of human solvent.

You pick up the microphone, it too reeking of its damp accumulations. The rusted teeth of the cover so brittle and inviting, fitting for the message which it carries. The "on air" button still sounds its magnificent claxon clunk when pressed, the mechanical counterpart to a butcher's cleaver coming down to split bone. Reflexively you blow through the small hole on the cover to test and see if its on before giving your address.

You read dutifully down the page, crumpled, torn, stained, rewritten, stapled, taped and rehashed over and over again. The message a simple one, passed down now through 4 generations of survivors, once held in high honor now reduced to a few coals of the once roaring flame. Yes, you two dozen and some now haunt rather than inhabit these halls, sending signals daily hoping for a sign.

You hear something, faint and fast. Some syllables, some sound, some psalm or such. You strain to listen, the rubberized cushions of the headset crumbling as you press them tighter, straining for salvation in that sound. Twice then thrice "survivors of the second calamity, we search for others. If you can hear us send a signal back."

My steed shall be the oldest dairy cow you can find. When she's been decommissioned and her usefulness is nearly spent she will be the one to bear me to you. I'll come right up the driveway, slowly, surely Riding sidesaddle, as if you'd care, we'll leave hoofprints that would scour the face of any breadcrumb. And when I descend from my ignoble steed the door will be waiting open, hungry as a cow.

My robes shall be as tattered as the apprentice's piece. With a texture so horrid its only slightly preferable to a hessian sack. It'll be too small in some places and sagging in others. So misshapen that I'll have to be sewn into it. You will take my arm and walk with me, the abrasion a lingering reminder of the possibilities to come. But at the end of the day when we've returned home, you'll be the one to help me out of it again and again.

My quarrel will be a dust storm on the horizon. You think you're prepared, you've been exposed to dust devils before after all. The damp rags under the doors and by the windowsills won't be enough. Gathering in places seen and unseen, the taste infiltrating everything you eat or drink. You may go insane but you WILL be changed. And in years to come when you find a few grains of sand in a breast pocket of something you thought long tucked away, you'll weep in prostration.

If I hadn't wasted all my words on people who did not deserve them trying to convince myself of a love that wasn't real I may still have something left to give to you. I have lowered and settled and tapped down and trimmed so much of what I have to offer, to make myself more palatable, that I sometimes wonder whether or not there's anything in me left.

People love a sequel, don'tcha know? A series of characters whose traits they have down, familiar and firm, it doesn't strain them. But to try something new, to let the possibility of disappointment in? Never. The issue then being, of course, if you do not let in anything new then you will also never have the chance to experience the peak of joy. It is, however, with these cold and cowardly masses us few adventurers must mingle.

And so I set about like any person promising to be palatable would, lopping off bits and pieces of me to cram myself into shapes I'd never be able to fit. When we talk about the changes a person goes through when they are loved they're always in the mutual sense. To be loved is to be change but people forget that to love is to also change immensely. To wrap yourself so tightly around something that it leaves a permanent indent, made even deeper when the object your wrap yourself around remains stiff and stalwart.

(sorry for the pics the text format for thisn is important, text of the thing is under the cut)

if we had all the time

from the beginning of it all

to the end of it all

when alpha and omega

finally fuse to throw

the world off its axis

and send us careening

into our timely deserved end,

when the last star has gone out

and all our little meanings

the pathways and poses of our lives

have crumbled under a magnitude

unfathomable to even the gods,

where existence itself

will one day go to die

and nothing and no one

will be left to mourn

or to even know sadness.

I still wouldn't have enough time

to tell you everything

maybe its the skin

the flesh and sweat

or maybe its eyes

tracking and tracing

the way you

hover inches away

tracing patterns arcane

bewildered and biting

no, it's your lips

spilling poison into mine

as I writhe, contort

burning into my bones

dissolving under influence

you carry on

and oh, my beloved

the blood

we shan't forget

hot and sticky

as you cut

revealing my truth

my shame 

drawing you closer

my heart beats

frantically, feverishly

as your fingers

brush up against places

sacred and soiled

spaces where no one

not God or man

could see before

but you aren't done

you never are

laying down your tools

you draw into me

landing comfortably

on gleaming ribs

head over my heart

every shriek every sigh

sends you quivering

as you feel my echo