tennessee

If I listen to myself long enough I can hear the contradiction. Shut up, listen louder, quiet, let them in, repulse your embarrassments, use your failures, think more clearly, stop making sense, hone your logic, divide yourself, make more sense, build your treasures, stop your fears, fend alone, open more doors, drive faster, feel, produce, let it be, watch, sequester, produce, go blind, produce, silence, noise, pause, time...
Oh, old boy, if we had to strain and see you and your world, lost in ours, waiting.

Where did the maggots go?
I opened the steel garbage lid to look for the maggots. Two days back they were crawling up the edges, popping about. Now they were gone. Probably a good thing, I thought. Eh. So I shoved in more trash (the contents of the plastic bin I used to collect my hair trimmings), compacting it down and sealing the lid tight, fearing the crawling things. I imagined waking up to the flies like a horror flick. I prayed that tonight the press below would stay quiet and chemical free but I knew it was a lost cause. Then I woke up screaming (I do that) to Buttercup shaking me, her face and skull throbbing in the early morning. My heart sank for how cruel I'd been and how cruel I'd stay in my collective stupidity.
You're not stupid Rose.
What's that Doll?
Silence. She was fast asleep but I still think she managed the words.
I love you, I say, in the silence, knowing we'd be burying her Grandmother in less than twelve hours. Poor girl, having been released from the cruel and advanced stages of Alzheimer's. Her body, in this case, the last stone to turn. And I cried in silence, cupping Buttercup's cheek where they'd removed the nerve. Praying the words that we'd picked for her mass over my caustic logic, my dead religion, mercifully free from doubt through the strength of family.

Job 19:1, 23-27

Oh, would that my words were written down! Would that they were inscribed in a record:
That with an iron chisel and with lead they were cut in the rock forever!
But as for me, I know that my Vindicator lives, and that he will at last stand forth upon the dust;
And from my flesh I shall see God; my inmost being is consumed with longing.
Whom I myself shall see: my own eyes, not another's, shall behold him...