The spine breaks with mirror ball consistancy.
The bottom folds in, while the edges fly out, glittering diamonds lighting up the air, dusting lungs with glass. Breathe that fresh and cutting air; slice lungs to ribbons, cheerless banners that fly in your body's last breeze.
I'd hum myself the tune, if I didn't hear it in my head, while I struggle for outer change and inner peace, it will be green peas, for my piece, and an anguished cry.
Oh, but I identify with hangers, they for all their hooks, must admit, the pleasure is in the ending. And though, but watch them, they drive to the burning man and they, once there, do no more than mere children have been doing for centuries.
Is it the raw strips of flesh that could show us a path that we do not walk? One of embracing hardship and hard feet? And the worn smooth edges that we all scrape at life with, can they be sharpened again by the return of ritual and rite?
Am I more comfortable in my skin having known more what it is like to want to be out of it? Is the endorphin, gliding like a shark through the tepid waters, is it the eurphoria of pain and ending, that keeps a glutton moving for punishment? Or is the needle as good as the heroin behind it?
That hammered gas pedal that prompted screaming driver and screaming engine, there is no foot in my back that makes me step every day, into a combustion, a push against consciousness that I can distinctly relate to.
And I know, finally, that I am not the man in the equation; for I know what it is that I dream about.
Will, like blistered skin, like a burn victim's recovery; will I bubble up and then weep, sores and apologies? No, I doubt, the scars will be there for life, long after the pin is gone.
And what we have, oh, deliciously have to face, is the very real possibility, that we all walk on the same coals; that the man that jumps from the towers in Africa, with rope made of bark and more slack than ground, the man the slams into turf and mother earth at 9 meters per second squared, the very real possibility that he is out there, in each of us. Or more finally, that he is us?
There is, it bears out, no mainstream culture; there are only those who, finding themselves just after rapids, settle in the calm with others, like minded, for a rest. Oh, but!
But; and this is more elation than warning, ... the rapids lie ahead again, as sharp as axes and as determined as those who have willingly paddled ahead. And the river always moves; catches up those who have willfully stayed behind.
I drape myself in a black watch tartan; soft warm cotton fluff. The passing hardships and deaths and sacrifices of yesteryear are the comforts and conviences of the present.
There will be no post humus awards for this man who wears the black; but with grace and a want of safety from the world without as I ransack the world within? Oh, quite yes, it is every bit as much a war as any who'd worn the blue green and black.
The only enemy is apprehension and anxiety.
Beyond; there is only the beyond. We may scramble to reach it, utterly, but we do not rush to be first, foremost never among the number to choke the sands with bodies.
When the doors drop down, you know a gunner has you.
That, I fear, is where we all are now, just behind the door.
Run, run with the wind, fools and foes, and feel that fleeting immortality, as we all are, for a limited time.
That is all there is.
And all there need be.