Whispers of an old candle,
Evening sunset over the hills,

Remembering the lost sandal,
A match illuminates a row of pills,
Clocking my punch card in,
Everyone around me, fading away,

In a race, life is thrown in a bin,
Never having time for play,

Drawing up the oil,
Urban toil, covering the soil,
Only to extinguish

For I wander here,
Along the same mountaintop,
My home is with me.

It’s hard to get a DUI if you can’t make it to your car without passing out. I keep a fresh bottle of whiskey next to my arm chair so I can throw the brakes on life and kick my feet up at the skies. I fly high, but it’s the only way to feel sober.

In the cockpit, I radio my vector to the victor, switch on the autopilot, and step away from the controls. From this point of view, it is hard to distinguish who is at loss. Is it me; the trained pilot, who is trained to give tasks to the autopilot? Or is it the plane, who is cutting through the skies a hundred times faster and higher than mankind was ever meant to travel? Or is it the fuel that was ****** out of the ground in the desert, where it’s lubrication was needed for preventing earthquakes, then separated by pressure and heat, before being barreled and shipped to the other side of the planet, where it is squeezed though a maze of pipes, into the tank of the jet liner. Once airborne, the jetliner burns thousands of tons of fuel every minute. Is the airline at a loss, chained to this ancient machine? Is the passenger at a loss, for being stuffed into the back of the plane with hundreds of others, stinking their way to the cabin. All dancing in line to get to the only toilet in the plane.

No, surely the toilet has the worst job.

Taking my hands off the bull’s horns, I let the beast breathe for a minute to cool down. I can feel the steam pumping through the giant’s lungs. The animal shudders. It’s feeding time.

Jumping off the motorcycle, and landing at the foot of a high octane pump, I turn around and open the fuel cap, only to find it’s bone dry. Curses. Feeding the pump plastic, I convince it to share a dram with my mechanical gorilla.

I am like toast. I’ve been burned. Crusty outside, soft middle. You spread your sugar on me, and consume me. When you’re done with me, you look into the fridge and pull out another bag of bread.

The waiter looks at me with the cheese grater in his hand, he starts twisting the handle, making milk confetti shoot out of the bottom of the contraption like old faithful in the summertime. The server asks me to say the word  “when” when I feel like I’ve had enough.

Looking down, I think about how like the cheese, I am a snail grinding into the earth; spending my life away at petty work, only to achieve my end goal of being nothing more than a trail of slime and a worn down shell; my ground beef mess of a body pointing the way in which I was traveling.

What shape would reveal itself, if I were looking at my trail from a higher ground? A circle? A line? Perhaps from above, my path is so thin, that it blurs from existence at further distances.

I look back up expecting to see the waiter. He is gone. My salad is cheesed.

Dancing
Along the wild mountain road,
the smell
of crisp lavender
fills the air

Birds chirp overhead,
guiding me home
Rays of sunshine peek
through a tunnel
of whispering green,
A warm breeze
from the lake wafts over me,
Freedom