1The tides of the ocean worked rhythmically, like clockwork, ticking past the seconds and hours and years that the everlasting sand timed its sinusoidal nature. A fragment of time lay just beyond its reach, bleached out, half-dead, and restrained to the churning sand by an innate certainty that he was the final pin in this cracked, backwashing machine. It shuddered through his mind like a chemical high, like cockroaches skittering through the splits of his cynicism.
It was
never here.
Some faded dream, sprawling its veins into the deepest reaches of his body, through his tongue and lungs and heart, as it searched to pierce his center of reality, to break him from his ivory radio retching static absolution.
The sound
it stained
felt sharp like
the churning of errant dreams into
no
no.
the clarity of glaciers, the patience of the leaves, the irreverence of the sky
he felt its turbulence race
[fast(er)]
slip through him like glasswater
fragmented
fractured
immaculate
with the grace of their better halves
and he breathed
(oh, he breathed)
with the stinging salt and the carrion and the unyielding power to rend his heart
and his words, all the words that pulled through his mind, pulled him through time, they whispered to his ear with the heat of quiet intention, pressing softly to the soul he never thought he had.
And mirrored to him lay the object of his catharsis, the one who passed the world through his spirit and laid claim to this nova of color eclipsing his life. That man was the black string laced between his hollowed ribcage, carrying the corpse (the carnage) of his elbows and dreams with all the conviction of Atlas. And as he breathed (it felt both tragic and beautiful) it echoed the sallow skin of this driftwood man before him, passing over his nose and lips and eyes and retracting back to him without
PAIN
His memory whispered to him in quiet tongues of guilt, rousing him from the fitful sleep of feverish dreams. The walls spilled light onto him, bleaching his gaze into the blankness of his mind. The world pieced itself together. It pieced itself together out of spite for him, out of the incessant, unrelenting hate that fate had for him. He was surrounded by the splattered portraits of nazis, sharpening themselves over time through the drug-addled haze. It took little time before they were sharp as knives, piercing through his warm confusion and striking the vein of reality. He knew, inherently, that he will die here.