
Burndown
To have been deceived by the screed. To have men as gatherers instead, of sorrows that begin to bulge within like a swelling liver against a rib. Such men would find themselves short of breath, because to be filled with something is to be emptied of another: the tenderness they had been taught to hunt, and kill. Perhaps in realistic anthropological terms they were the beasts being chased to exhaustion, or the gorge, filled with wrecked men, after the cliff edge.
There is not enough width in your lachrymal canals to quell the fires below, but even if there were, you’ve never been taught to cry, never been shown a breakdown without a burndown. Never been taught to rest awhile. When you close your eyes the hound dogs of oblivion continue their chase. Why give any ground? Why revisit the cold open every day begins with? Why regret the way you’re being ground into component ores?
So we act like the fissile raw materials that we are, should. The condo, rowhome, culdesac warehouses hold a sequence of homemade reactor failures. Because there are fewer valorous wars to cull the herd. Because we are an army of volunteers that can do it ourselves. If deaths of despair are a problem, get the Dolby surround, the wrap-around visor, the haptic bodysuit, the sensory-deprivation tank of sodium-rich whimsy. Better the pixel baptism than to encounter a self as mouse in a cocaine-and-electric chair machine. To glow the lightbulb of oneself, by oneself. To thus project a simpler story on a blank wall, is the mission, should you choose to accept.