220715A
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The words escape me.
A dry wound
that has stopped bleeding
having run out
of red stain
to apply to various surfaces.
Nothing but red ink.
The skin seems so very thin,
even at the best of times.
Offering no real protection
from all of the unwelcome incursions
that seek to violate borders.
The body a bag of contraband
ideas and bones.
The little opportunities
that never pan out.
The lucky breaks
that remain so evasive,
and always unapproachable.
Forever on the wrong side
of the barriers.
No interesting moments,
in such a long time.
A run on sentence
without hope of punctuation.
The row of faces
that are all promising
to prove equally boring.
I can do nothing for them.
They need their monotony
and they want their clowns.
Lambs on the treadmills
of the latest trends in vapidity,
cultivating all the new forms
of prevalent disinterest.
It passes as a prescribed reality,
that hardly anyone questions.
Something that gets reward points,
for remaining regular.
The trend being to avoid anything
that might prove unusual,
or could be published in tabloids.
Anything that one can trade off
in exchange for something else,
only trades one misery for another.
Everyone counts themselves lucky
not to have your discontent.
That is the one bargain
that they never want to make.
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220715B
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Whatever you would get
would never bring what you would want,
but it might keep you from sinking
any deeper than you have gone.
The more you struggle with it
the more the quicksand takes you down.
The kind of life you really want to live
is the one that you can only read about.
There is nothing common about any of it.
Everything that they did was exceptional.
They knew all the interesting people,
and went to all of the best parties.
If only you could slide in between pages,
to where their story is better than your's.
Trading up to something better,
instead of lowering expectations.
You stopped watching television,
because it kept teasing you
with all those better chances
that it told you that others always had.
You have never been in the good places,
and so what you got to meet
isn't what you wanted to keep.
You learned the habit of letting them go.
You do not feel like going out anymore,
because you have lost those naive hopes
that once kept you going.
You pull back, withdrawing in retreat.
That was not ground that you needed to win.
It was always the invite that you did not get
that chanced to change your life,
but never for the better.
No one told you that it goes like that.
You get to watch from a distant window,
wondering where you lost your way,
to never finding what you came for.
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220715C
-----------
Repeated crash landings,
from all the failed escape attempts.
If only something from all of that
had led to getting away.
Memory books crowded with wreckage.
Familiar faces look strange,
having all moved on, long ago,
to where you do not know them anymore.
Dead batteries in the rescue beacon,
that you hoped would bring salvation
from all of that obscurity.
Communications have drifted out of range.
You doubt that anyone remembers you,
as anything of any importance.
Your island has become invisible,
to any of their passing ships.
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220715D
------------
The line remains dead.
Another termination of connections.
The conversation ended long ago.
A cliff hanger ending
in what became a cancelled series.
It is always a chain reaction,
the way everything always piles up.
Plans get changed suddenly,
leaving measurements at the crash scene,
mystical chalk marks, and various relics.
I never meet the same new person twice
in any of my dreams.
If I ever did, I simply do not remember her.
That is hardly any sort of beginning,
as to anything before the sun comes up.
You know that you can never go back,
to anywhere that you really want to be.
The traffic is rerouted, bumper to bumper,
through the tunnel, across the horizon.
No reasons ever being given.
You listen to the news trying to find something,
hidden between those dead pan lines.
As if there might be some actual meaning
to the whole sequence of events,
derailing, then plunging into the river.
Another victim was discovered
apparently stabbed to death with sharp pencils.
There was no apparent motive.
Identity withheld pending notification of kin.
An example for others to worry about.
It is always all of the efforts that get erased,
right down to the smudges of regret.
The log book gave clear indications
as to where the ship went down.
It said that nothing else was saved.
Time gets spent on random chance,
taking another sharp right and then a left,
before the recess bell happens to ring,
reminding you how it all felt so many times
when you wanted to throw in the towel.
Rolling with the punches was never enough
to get you in and over the top,
to winning any of the dolls on display,
but there are other ways that beauty can haunt you,
without giving you any of its blessings.
You try to find something to do,
but you never seem to fit into any of the envelopes,
no matter how you happen to fold.
It is always about trying to get somewhere
despite all of the cancellations.
You keep trying to rub out the chalk line
as it keeps tracing its way around you.
Trying to keep from becoming another statistic,
is all about the numbers
even if you never know a winning combination.
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