i sat down and sketched

a picture of the view from my mother's porch between puffs of a cigarette with numb fingers as my life force flowed out thru the ink: blood in yesterdays river beds. this is not what real used to be here in this place grown so foreign. but the fields grant me sanctuary from the storm of my everyday emotions. time gnaws on my backbone by the minute, an ornery old rat who has to cut his teeth on the remorse of spent youths. other ways it could have gone build their castles and crumble in the wake of an incoming wave of sleep. i dream behind my eyelids when i blink and the world rewinds at night. those four precious hours of restless nothing fuck! to think my hands have handled the millions of ages and pages and dust and words of wandering hermits i cannot know. it pains me that my path lies as it does, between the roses and the thorns. casting the die for the dead. rolling with the punches of the living. asking what we can of who will listen. listening to what we can of that which makes it through.