Pulse

I'm walking on broken ground. An acrid tincture squeezes blood from my tongue to leave me muted in situ. Waiting to be usurped.

To my body I am Xeno & we are at war.

My skin is a porous tomb & I am heavy with the clinging fog, aching with the strain of bones breaking their better natures not to run from this place.

Some days I can't stand to be so accessible. Voice is an instrument serving the heart’s melody to lovers; it is inexcusable for that melody to be served unkempt and out of time.

Is there a prayer one might whisper to invoke a gentler mind? Some incantation to incite the wake of a slumbering sea whose winds have retreated to their Æolian chamber, having razed the surface of a despondent coast irreparable, leaving an emptiness within a mere reflection of stars that drifts in the echo of inimitable silence –

The pulse I rest in is one of peace attained solely by the obedient absence of the storm complacent in a quiet that is borrowed, not to mention shallow in effect, affecting each tender sinew I claim as my own as the tendrils of memory spiral into antiquity.

Every breath occurs within a reliquary as dispassionate as it is disused, a foreign amphora to be emptied, existing in quadrants, struggling for necessity.

To what compound fracture of self can I attribute these insufficiencies?

My machine is the Xeno that inspires insurrection.

.30.8.16.