where will the wicked run to, on that last day?

the january silence is quiet, not deafening like december. if you breathe in deep enough you can feel clarity in your lungs. ice cold like mentholated cough drops. hock up any debris, coated sheets of dirt from my core. collected in small pools and spat out, to make way for health, for open airways and the ice cold.

my thighs ache with a pain only felt when i have been bent out of shape. placed in positions i never requested. and from this contrived position i begin to question every last one of my actions. wonder how i can sift through values that lie deep beneath years of telling the wise one in me to keep quiet. how it is those ideals that make me happier, how i refuse to bring them forth into the real world. eliminate the excess, the meaningless interactions, the feeling of drunk eyes burning into mine that bare no emotion. only small glimmers that fizz out from way beyond the retina. from a place behind the eyes that the looker refuses to agree with. to look at himself. so i am left looking at empty pockets and blatant disappointment. the even sharper sting of knowing it would execute this poorly, this void of satisfaction, no coherence, nothing stitched together. and i am left aware that i am even more isolated. standing atop piles of dirt and scattered clothing and trash and tissues and i face everything individually, in my own skin. these relationships built on bare skin and nothing else entirely, not even a penny contributed. just explicit and excruciating closeness, but never extend your heart out, never extend anything from the waist up.

and if i begin looking at you from the waist up i see two large hip bones, a smooth muscular uprising to the navel, the thick hair leading up your center, clavicle, strong but not protruding collar bones. a firm, outstanding neck and a face. a face where the birth of life lives. in lips i wish could say the truth of the dark past we all swam in. in eyes i wish could not be black holes leading nowhere, to lands with no possibility. how i wish they were open and bright and led to a togetherness. a collaboration, a violent splattering of paint on the bland walls that surround me so we can color it all in. with our own views, our own imagination, the stories we will tell and create and fasten tightly around our wrists, like cuffs keeping us together. how that chaining could fix one of us, which one of us i am not sure. or neither becomes healed, just temporarily ameliorated. silenced. a sore throat fantasy.