Piers

How is it that the days of summer pass so quickly, one day you are lighting a half assed sparkler on the fourth of july and all of a sudden it nearly September and all of the stone fruit are bruising to the last silks of summer corn, and the fog that never quite quitted us gets more saline, and the supplest of trees are turning already.

I am three weeks laid up and going bat shit crazy, it's well enough to be off the crutches, but the immobility is rendering six shades of stir crazy. In my enclosing walls I am going to strip off the ugly, immobilizing boot and I am going to strip down and I am going to quit this willing prison and I am going to run through the panhandle when the sprinklers are on, fog and ankle be damned. I don't care if I have to drag it, I don't care if I have to hoist it, I don't care if I rip every tendon and muscle, and I don't care if the bones shatter as I run, as long as I am running, trotting, loping, moving... Rather than inert on the couch, letting the best of the demons best me, silent and running out of liquor and cigarettes and keening, furled over the still swollen ankle with a howl dying in my throat.

And that 22nd century gentility is the last vestige I am clinging to before I open my mouth and start screaming and screaming and screaming, I just pull my lips back and recline my neck and out if pours, and pours and dead soldiers and dead children and the hungry and the unseen and out, and out in pours and desicration, and dessication, and distended bellies, and fattened bellies, and pork bellies and a three hundred million bridge to nowhere, and the loneliness, oh god, the loneliness. Not enough booze or cigarettes on earth to quell that particular demon, and that nagging, sinking feeling that despite your best intentions, despite having set your alarm 15 minutes early, you are going to miss the life ferry, indeed you've missed it, there it is burning off fog and everyone is walzing on the deck as I stand bereft on the pier