Sometimes the hill walks you
Sometimes the hill walks you. And you never see it coming
In this tomb-ridden city, my afternoon swamp, I roam the sultry grounds for something I can’t find. These poor forgotten trees trace a signature of sorrow. Accumulating violence, I recount the bitter steps forced upon me by geography and time. I never thought I'd get this far, and yet, I head for nowhere. It’s harder to other yourself in prose, and the better the life, the worse the text. Nobody knows what they’re looking for until they find it. Then, they spend the rest of their lives looking for that thing, knowing fully well they’ll never find it again.
Sometimes the hill walks you, and it tramples on your dreams, and your lowly, faint existence warrants nothing you can cherish. Sometimes the dragon chases you, regardless the rules. The soundless bells of death and loss cry my name throughout the daytime of my life. The analog clock, feudal lord of my hours, shall pay me not to smile again. I’m the desert prince of this catacombed existence, forced to remember, coerced to forget. In desperate attempts at capturing disappointing twilights in poetry, I’m resigned to what I see, never who I am. And like nature, I always fail.
I get drunk on what I see online and empty my dreams, on these countless empty surfaces, my crumbling walls of text. In these nameless streets of empty cities, windowless, their buildings flee, to yonder time, before my mind was ever trapped in flesh. A panoramic life, from the peaks of mountain cameras convinced me I deserved their gaze. My travels but a pitstop for the friends I yearn to see, whose thinly gloved hands I shake before they slip my grip, like bloody sand in summer. I never sleep, I live in dreams, and I warrant no correction. From a shithole with a view to the labyrinth of poverty, I passed the test of being a failure, and yet, I failed at failing life.
I got the right stuff for the wrong machine. In the autumn of my studies lies the spring of my depression, the end of the month signals the end of my days. I’m convinced that I deserve it, and the rent won’t pay itself. All our dogs are dead now. I carry scars of wars I never fought, I speak of them in kind. I’m full-belly broke, feeling empty stomach drunk.
This city will destroy me, lest I do it first myself. The rural goth child, living in a lost time, waiting for that moment that I know will never come. Getting nuked by an undead sun on an asteroid beach, forever I gaze at its pale-tan kisses with my sickly stoned eyes. The colors beget an esoteric aftertaste. You make it so damn hard to leave.
I scrape the corners of my mind to find excuses not to have you, but the memory remains of all the times I wish I cherished. I rot in meditation as a means to guard my sense of self against the ever-weakening leash of memory. If I forget their names, their pain will have been in vain. Their pain was my pleasure, and their pleasure was mine. All my pleasure is painful. They love me now I‘m sad. They love you as a shell, a hollow statue of what you claim to be. I drink another beer in search of justice, but when the juice hits I‘m off. I only love when I’m drunk, and I hate it all when sober. No amount of drugs can make this city livable.
As I sit on the afternoon steps of a castle-like maze, I punch walls with my face, eating bricks for breakfast and hammers for dinner. I was born too late and it’s my fault. Nobody taught me how to have a soul or shave my face. In dealing in currency and phantoms I became a ghost myself, counting shadows of a better life and winds whose woes shall never blow. I know not what tomorrow brings, but I’m sure to lose at life again. None of this is scientific, and yet I feel an urge to speak. But I’m not morally allowed to complain. I roost in the dirt and count my sheep, the test goes on forever. Sometimes the hill walks you, and you never see it coming.
