The words are gone, the parties cracked glowsticks spilling their blood on the sidewalk.
The minutes that felt all mine, personal, a glove around space-time that I dictated -

now they’re standardized to measure the effects of real disparities in theoretical constructs.

But my fingers twitch, my teeth find skin, the coffee keeps coming but the world doesn’t slow.
And someday I’ll LOSE IT and bike naked through my new streets and claim it all back, the dark spangled world I used to inhabit, that evaporated in the false lights of the city.

Give me back the yellowed bricks and the pensive dizzy walks home. Running through the forest with the vultures up ahead and the cracked pavement underfoot, woods rising like spectres, autumn crackling on all sides, loneliness lifting up my steps and fog curling around my neck. The songs all say the cities are exciting but the outskirts are alive, the outer places plead, they love you with a desperation those glutted urbanities won’t understand.

They’ll call us home someday. That dark earth, the gnarled tree. Empty fields and brick-husk-buildings will welcome us with fireflies and curving mist and the quiet dramatics lost to the souls beating their spreadsheet hearts, with space budgeted x for family and y for ******* and the bullet-to-the-heart z (complacence). They’ll call us home, remind us the world is made of ghosts, the bones of trees, the bodies of clay, and the dust of flowers. That bluebird chirping is the only true sound you’ll ever hear. The pine needles and the wind are saying something important, and I live in a world of windowpanes! The fog is lifting, the sun is rising, and all the ghosts are going home. The waterfalls keep falling, but they fade from memory. The rocks jut towards the heavens, just as always, but my appreciation fades. Now I’m left -