Lard

Some nights I feel overwhelmed and affected by a profound mood, like a wild fire whose certain cause is so uncertainly defined, and with such matching heat and passion that I feel my entire self rendered, running free and clear. I am translucent, showing bone and marrow, an exhibitionist of hopes and sorrows. And I have no will to move the world but that it should move me, runny and delicate, and vulnerable to every sincerity with the promise of a view, from which I might relearn my own profile, and for which I open all my secrets.

But sure as rain, with time enough, I cool. And in the night, dwindling embers turned to ash, my maudlin manners congeal again, so I awaken in the morning, thick and dense, opaque as the blanket that covers my face from the twilight dawn. And though once I cried for some grand thing, now I lie against the cold morning, shameful and embarrassed. Who should see me so naked? And that I dared to show it. Who am I? And the perfumed self I was that still lingers faintly on my breath, smells now like a gasoline, a numbing sadness, a great regret, that I can never choose to simply be that self which shame had fled and made so free.

Mike LinComment