Always here and neverwhere, spindles out of this breath, his breath, the last one I took over him as he exhaled, his chest vicious with struggling, the slight sweat, my hand on his brow, the black coffee by the hospital bed, his brother at the foot, tunnel vision, this is all you saw of them, the light through the window, spring giving herself over to summer, that light, the echo of the stain, the memory, the fear, the lie told, the fly in his coffee, here he was suddenly dying before you with deep exasperated breaths, the heaving of his chest, the way yours was caught when his palm caught your cheek and then he was gone, just like that, and the impecable silence.

Not the first of the day, not the last, the muddling in the middle, the series of steps in the middle, along somewhere, at least there is that, between sleep and deprivation, betweem waking and suffering, everything inbetween, the grace of finger across the back of your head, the sigh of relief, the pellets of water from the shower, the spoon clenched between his lttle teeth, at least there is that, the between, the distance shortened infintismally, between here and the grave, everything that matters.

Does the rage overwhelm you?
I wouldn’t say overwhelm…
What would you say?
I mean I don’t hit things. Not anymore. I might throw something, but it’s out of my system right then and there.
So the rage compels you-
What does that mean?
You’re not helping yourself you know.
If I could help myself I wouldn’t be here now would I?

You’d think it would be difficult to pop it out, to say it, to jot it down. And it is to a great extent: it isn’t afterall meaningful, just words on the fly.
As a child I played with fighter planes and admired birds, their magnificent wingspan and the physics of their flight but I never wanted to fly myself, never wanted to be a pilot. I knew my place even then: on the ground, grounded, feet firmly planted envying the sky.

Always that slight musty smell that he could never get rid of and the creak of the stairs that annoyed her to no end. “At least,” he had told her, back when he was oblivious to the disintergration of their marriage and she was in the full swing of it, “you’ll hear me coming.” And he smiled and for the first time she hadn’t, but as all things that were too close to discern them for what they truly were, he didn’t see it. At the bottom of the stairs, he saw nothing, heard only the rain pound the basement windows.
Where were the children?

Sometimes you could not tell who was burning whom, whose burns were deeper or more profound. I found myself confused at times: was I picking my own scabs or hers? And still the sizzle, still the butts strewn underneath her window. Inedibles for dirty pigeons and wayward ants far from home.

Tricks of the trade, tricks of the slave. We own you. Cherish you. Lavish you. We fill you up. We fill you out. To the brim. We are the rim of your consciousness. We butter you up and make you slick for the world. They won’t get a handle on you. Let them try. They’ll never figure you out.

Each time you come out here, he said, you are literally sucking your life away.
Yes, yes, I said, I am and all that. Look, I continued, does it matter? The quality of life is getting better everyday. Even if I have less life to live, the life I’m living gets better every moment.
But, he interjected, if that’s the case wouldn’t you want to live longer since the longer you live there’ll be more to enjoy?
No, I replied, at some point it’s just nurses and dribble on your chin. Who needs a healthy pair of lungs for that?