The Registry

You have left us in a quandary. You have picked yourself up from your sullied bootstraps, used sticks to pick the mud between the cracks, smelled the earth, felt the wind, and fought against the unyielding horror of truth. Because only once tucked beneath the restricting confines of unbleached dependance could you ever hope to flourish and not to dissolve within the wake of death.

We are priests of a clandestine order, and we hold within our grasp a declaration delivered between the teeth of the most innocent. It doesn’t matter that lies pave the road that leads you deeper within the pines, to a place that embraces you in forgetting. Because forgetting is a salve, an emulsified translation of a story that begins with a punch to your spleen, and then goes downhill from there. 

There is solace in pain. And solace, as you are staring up into the eye, fence slats circle you like a poor man’s halo, is a presence that comes to its rightful place with an air of solemn acceptance.

I have carved a life at the precipice, and I have absorbed the rites of agony. I have invited it, welcomed it, and I have suffered before it a thousand deaths. But it is merely a Tuesday. One of thousands. And in the morning, I will stand in an alley, smell the stench of stale permanence, and I will dream of another moment much like the ones I was given a mere day before. 

There is a hunger that has moved from my belly to my bones. I eat now, but only to shut down the devil sound. The hunger is something that is born of the sum total of, yes, that.

They are blind, robed, kneeling before a conflagration, bellows in hand, stoking the fire which knows no end. And I am tied before their chattering teeth, their stinking, drooling maws, and I am at peace. 

At peace because no matter how many turns are taken, all in the name of fear, of resentment, of rejection, of betrayal, of anger, of whatever the fuck you want the turns to be, no matter it all . . .

I sat on that bench and I lived your heart. 

All within a place that protects as much as it exposes. 

How fitting that we are where we are today, and that I am less in the absence, and that it doesn’t matter. 

There has come a wave of clarity and of definition. 

I have been given the wisdom to lay before it, without fear. 

The rest, well, the rest shits on you. Broken. Let’s walk together, and you can tell me your story. I hear it’s very good. I like a good yarn. 

I know you.