The lady is awake, she has slipped away downstairs. Far away, another universe, so distant and hostile to my existence. Alien galaxy expands beneath, between, that world and mine.
I breathe slowly and shallow beneath blankets of warmth, of support, of cover. No, I will not become awake and no I will not suffer the day.
Before five she rose, beating the alarm siren to the punch. Silently into the bathroom to clean and dress and steal herself away down there into her kitchen comfort to prepare her sustenance and organize her thoughts for her day ahead. Her kingdom is her Christendom.
This dark coven is where my belonging lurks. My skull is thick and heavy with the weight of ten thousand dead neuroreceptors pinning the side of a course, unshaven face to the sweat stained, spittle smudged pillow, my grey cloud. Weary from head to toe, weary of blood sugar irregularity stirred and shaken in a cocktail of last night’s alcoholic medication. I drank to endure the hours until time for sleep came along. So now I drown in the thick puddle of bodily fluid and suffer unconscious guilt not being able to peel the bristled cheek from the Egyptian thread count linen.
Feet do please fail me now. The anchors that bore me through years of blue-collar drudgery bereft of accomplishment, millions of steps along a highway to nowhere. Two bundles of metatarsals bound in aged parchment; skin bordered by the calluses of useless overuse. Feet driven by musculature and tendinopathy. No longer can sagging sacks be referred to as calves but as worn emptied bullocks waiting for the piledriver to end. Achilles tendons earning their ancient destroyer title, tearing, and shortening with an age of effort for no reward and zero mercy.
Knees, please become warmed. Attend those patella tracks of movement that wore through fifty years, refuse to inflame and swell in complaint against overuse. Rest? Only when I am no more may rest be accepted. Seven billion of those pairings perform in Earthly action today; so do your job and don’t complain about how intricate or delicate that you are. Your job for life is to lift me, walk me, support me as I perform tasks set by the being of a human. Give up on me? I shall give up on it all.
Calories have been swallowed to provide glucose on which my body may burn and fire. Where art thou cursed carbohydrates? Why are you hiding away in the deep recess of a cadaver interned ten hours under the sheet? I am empty. I am spent. Erase me sleep, please absorb my being into the world around me.
Noise boasts a reality of function in her world. The water is boiling in preparation for caffeine injection to the heart rate muscle. Cereal rings bright into that fine china bowl to be splashed with full cream, ice cold milk bringing the provision of the most important meal of the day. Dishes clatter from dishwasher to cupboard, glasses slide from draining board to shelving. I stir. I turn through one hundred eighty degrees and sigh deep within that pillowed bamboo shelter. Sanctuary.
Today is another impossibility. How can I rise as she does and see the day as an opportunity to make change, make an impression last, make earning of a paltry sum to bring back to these four walls. Industry waits on my inconsistency, expectation set amongst an inability to do any one thing as required by a simple society. The workplace awaits with all the stock of failure that surely engulfs me. I will not be good enough at the skills that I do not learn nor own in sufficient volume. Physical condition will fail me as I make best effort, so short of the desired input. Too old, too slow, too backward, too much for this man who has become too little. Hours will become days, days will become weeks, weeks have become years amongst those factory shelves. It will end me, bury me in pallet stacked cartons of underachievement. I cannot rise and go and be. Time has ended here.
The end has come, here in a sour musty super queen, wrapped in the cloth of years cocooned. Man can do only so much as the grindstone turns pumice rock on granite bed, constantly milling this god forsaken bag of bones, fats, distorted connective tissue to a pulp. endless
Death bed dreams of yesterdays, forever a millennium distant. Orbiting far away, moonlike, distant from this vicious gas cloud of life of pantomime, planetary miracle. No shuttle can take me back to a world of wonder at future promise. Columbus cleared the tower with infinite promise then boosted onward with finite energy through those teen atmospherics driving that skin and bones of this humanity toward a destination always on tilt, threatening implosion. Thruster three did not fire for this participant. Deep in the half-light of bedding and blinds that close out the world of commercial horizon. My tiles of protection have been torn away exposing my soft underbelly to the sun, to the rays of demand and to explosion. No lift off from the mattress of morose feeling today. I will stay and be the lunar rover, run flat and abandoned by man at the edge of existence. Forget me, it will not be hard, it will make no demand on your mental acuity. Move onward, wayward from the ancient, surpassed technology, of ancient stupidity.
She triggers the garage door. Command through another plastic button ignites electric eco power. The roads of mapped improvement await her at the curb. My curb is where I will stay. A weed, ugly and pestilent on the edge of the roads to everywhere and everything and nowhere. Poison me.
I love her.
This lady sucks every ounce of purpose that I have left back toward the light when she smiles with that beautiful mouth full of gleaming white teeth. Female fire blasts from her eyes as she looks into my darkness and reignites my retinas, flooding me with bright white light.
I must wish her a good day, good time, good morning, good woman.
Unchained, I tear free of that plasterboard cage, burst from that dark cold box of no room.
Stairway taken at the double I burst through front doors to that harsh new world, held desperately at bay since dark night fell.
“Good day my love.”
When you return, I will be waiting for your life giving, beautiful energy self.
The sun always rises.