The Broad Shoulders

Prose

I found this today, I don’t know how old it is. Maybe 20 years, most likely more.

So now you may know all you can about me, I have seen you by god's hand run hard into freshly tilled soil, shouting wild. A hoarse scream, "eat it, consume yourself." You washed yourself clean of every day, and I prayed to a god who force fed you the earth out in an empty field in Illinois. I prayed permission to write about you, and for my part I would seal the letter up with wax and inside would be all the better parts of me. And I would sent it every single place that you are not. And for your part you will never know. Out loud. And as I float through my surroundings, tired from all of it. Bore, burnt blighted and soon buried. A jumble of narrative lacking, loved but for the linear, my more relaxed leanings limp long, oh, tired. Shot into flight, in an old car, off a mountain cliff. So now I address all my writing to you. You shiny new run on sentence. I dance like Kafka with no hope in me. All terrified love and love for terror. None of my life feels like it's started yet. And apparently I am complicated and I don't look like I outwardly express my true self through my appearance. My hands forget how to use my pen, and my pen forgets to ruin me with semi-permanence. I'm trying to make this heady run at perdition. Deafened by the big trucks whipping past, gravel thrown in a throaty roar and my clothes whipped against me in a cracking flutter. My shoes have holes in them, everything seeps in eventually. I have a bad tendency to wear through souls. A blind mockery, always robbing the best I've ever met of our senses. Nothing is static. All of these tiny murders. I live and die on every next word. "Leave me alone." No. Why do you have to be? Everyone here is more fundamentally vibrant than me. It feels like I've been wearing these clothes for twenty days. So no wonder I have issues. My sacrifice of myself seems disingenuous and small. No attention and all of my attrition. "It's the broad shoulders buddy, everyone assumes you can take it." A numb breakdown. Every obesity a mirror and no quarter given. Empathogen, I had no choice, lo I did, and I will refuse it. And the bite does not hurt, and you will not know you were bitten until the toxin is taking hold and paralysis is on you. Oxygen starved and with depressed breathing, gone blurred in a soft focus terror, your heart stops. The devil does not walk with a limp but carries a cane. Every smooth flourish slides under my skin. Every step a trip on my own effort. Endured like a freak storm at sea, hail raining into the water; not golf balls, but boulders so large they seem to fall in slow motion, like an entire cliff of ice sliding gently into the sea below, and you and your car land there in the frozen tumult. The devil walks calmly on the water as you sink, trapped but free from panic. He kneels down as you go under the glassy dark blue, in your flooding apartment, and he says "I can save you." His smile is the thin lipped lie that poisons your last thoughts. A well cultivated shamble. "Well what can you do then? What are you good at?" That closes my throat. Ashes float after me like I'm smoldering sometimes, and everywhere I go may as well be Pompeii on the day of the blast. Waking up covered in tiny mystery burns. Moths navigating by the moon's bulb. Luna, by her name, finds her way in. And lately the tangle of my hair confuses me. The knife doesn't even need to cut. Heat the blade and just lay it on skin. I like the burn so much more. My kind of stinging aftermath. Pink ringed and aching. Yellowed infection. Fevered for a week. I know I was burnt, fresh, sticky, naked, a glazing over, sloughing off and done. Fuck you, I will not leave. Six cigarettes in the ash tray. Inaction and passivity. I'll figure it out. Where did you get your start? Some days my voice is not my own at all. "God you sound like your father." My voice, lost in my tangle, I try to steal others. Describe others, describe me. You may as well have slit my throat and laid me out on cold white tile to shiver and bleed. Then knelt down next to the spreading pool to lap at the shallow red sea like a cat licking at a saucer of milk. Smudged green marker on the corkboard in the mens bathroom says "We are all consumers in the marketplace of despair." Half breaths. Every dollar in preparation to starve. But lipped, bit tongued, but cheeked. Breed my fear like show dogs. Kill the weak and imperfect and keep only the strongest and best examples. A polite sob in the corner would do me in. I can't cry anymore. It reminds me of Fight Club. The narrator who can't sleep. Walking into dusk again and again. I want to live in the night, and light it up. You can't stop me from addressing you. Hear the drums? Describe fluid motion. Do you walk? Or do you fail? She talked in God's rhymes or not at all, but watching, and eating us with every move. So I stood lost and cool on the hotel room's balcony and I learned to want things I didn't think about very often. Collapse. Following up a hill, and at the top on grass with clear blue shelter above, cry mercy and slowly take my eyes. As long as my nose is bleeding. Synapse hum. These unspoken systems, buzzing math, drone run, cried my shot. Run on me. "It's the broad shoulders."

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This was obviously some stream of consciousness nightmare put to a document.

I don’t know what it is.