You watch your arms paint you in that invisible shroud. To cover your screaming nakedness, your openness, you think, you hope, as the pain begins to move through your body and signal self-defence. But instead it flags you: red to the waiting wolves, red from your beating heart and flush into your view of the world. Scent is a powerful promise and it causes reactions you need, despite your avowing them eschewed.
You think to turn, but uncertainty is just a split-second. With its job done, it departs and you fail to follow through, pulling only just so hard on the bowstring to cause damage, but not death. Which should mean your own in place of another. Or was that the intention? The cowardice of respite, the uncommon bravery of those who have lost the worth in their words.
You step back.
Your thoughts speak to all and sundry, ignoring you as they reply: “We have no time for you, no time to waste, no time.”
The seconds mock you as they tick their lives gladly: “tick, tick, tick, tick”, each a smile and waving hands, gloved and waving, falling to their doom, too soon to know sorrow, too quick to know sad: they should be. Could be. With the right impetus: a little push here, a little nudge and quickly grab, to miss, and observe in slo-mo a world in its own world, a lifetime lived and destroyed, a universe created and spoiled.
Cold. It is. It is.
“But you are not,” comes the thought, rising slowly aromatic in its insouciant correction.
And maybe you are, but you are buried deep within the misshapen tepee that is your form, your gait, your dreams and fait(h).
Seeking.
It is what you say you do. It is what you do, you say, but how you do what you do and say it is what you say is never seen outside and rarely inside
Perhaps we should just call it sleep and be done?
A rainy Sunday under the covers when once you would parlay with the raindrops as they sung in puddles, played xylophone down the leaves and trees and wriggled down your spine, past the back of the hood you chose to not put up.
Why protect yourself from what you want?
Though it is not, you said. Before. So many times.
And one day when it is, you will welcome it. And miss it. And wonder. Wonder about it as you gaze into those eyes.
Whose eyes?
The eyes that are yours.
1 comment:
Postscript:
But you know you want the screams, the beating chest still-beaten, beaten still but not so still it stops; just cries itself to the ground, foetal, conspicuous, stuttering for breath.
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