What Is Lost

Chance for respite. The sign of the wild tom turkey spreading his fan in the sunset light of the greening backyard. chance for long talk into the years. Grim dreams of history, too grim, like black lung, or heartburn. Homestead in the stream hills.

The news is always bad. Spots on the liver, the right adrenal. Having to take pills that make you sick, to make you well. Small chance of success. Another spot near the spine, still there, still eroding bone.

A skeleton, wind-carved, grit-polished, with a nick out of it where living tissue ate into itself, devouring its own essence. Ablation of the memory of function.

Everything we say we hate, we become, unless we love it instead. So hard to love it, though. Living it, enduring it, is killing me. Give up everything of my own, and no promise I'll ever get it back. Some illusion of reward, at the end of all this hardship? It's never been given before, I don't believe in it, or in punishment. Just endurance.

Like the rocks endure: geologic; uplifting, and eroding, one faster than the other, trading places; carved into gorgon shapes in the Badlands my soul cries out, seeing its own shape. I seek out the desert because it's what I feel. A place to be home: desolate, unforgiving, familiar.

Hold space for the infinite. Only chance of respite. Small chance, no chance. I endure. Not liking it very much. Just enduring. Hold space. Just hold.