Going north and stepping on cracks that expand so far up and down that they’re stairs now.
Lifting into a sky cherry red with blackened clouds of pure wet darkness, suffocating on raindrops that they won’t let go of.
Spears of ice crash into wood and scream; people scream like that.
Bones can be crashed into, flesh, and they scream.
Lie on your stomach with your elbows sinking into the dirt and feel everything that you stopped letting yourself feel, grab a worm as it crawls by and then set it back down and think about how you allowed it to live.
You could have stopped its life but you didn’t, and what does that make you?
Something good, or simply not a monster?
What would make you good?
You’ve only ever wanted to be good.
But it’s hard enough just to be. Let your elbows collapse and fall face first into the ground now, breathe in the dirt and let the grass poke you in the corners of your eyes, let dirty little white flowers make their way into your mouth, and breathe in the ground like a worm.
Is a worm good or bad. Does it matter.
Can you be one. Are you, now?
About the Creator
Keep reading
More stories from Rowan Finch and writers in Poets and other communities.
A New Heart
Sam sat on the edge of a partially buried, long defunct piece of machinery, all black ledges hanging over bent cabins crammed with wires and ribboned throughout with bar grating panels. He held his knees close to himself and stared into the near distance at a massive, rusted metal tube that sat in the middle of a field of dead grass. It was lying on its side, allowing the wind to race through it, creating a powerfully haunting bellow that echoed throughout the despairingly still and lonely world.
By Rowan Finch5 years ago in Fiction
My New Book is Finally Here
My poetry collection Beautiful and Brutal Things is done. It's actually done and finally published over 270 pages. Over a year of my life went into this book. More than a year, really. Long days at my computer, sometimes seven days a week because I couldn't stop even when I probably should have. Then two months of editing that felt harder than the writing itself. But it's finished, and I'm still standing, and the book is real.
By Tim Carmichael3 days ago in BookClub
Comments
There are no comments for this story
Be the first to respond and start the conversation.