Blood Fatigue

My muscles are ragged

Threadbare

My bones are heavy with dust

And my skin is brittle,

Dry and torn from too much stretching

Too much aging

And not enough lotion

My mind swirls

And stagnates

All at once

I can’t make sense of these thoughts

Somewhere

Perhaps there’s a spark

Or an ember

But it is buried in ash,

I see no light

There is no warmth

I am too tired to flare up

Overwhelmed

Fatigued,

In my very blood

My cells have lost their powerhouses

My mighty mitochondria, they wither

They retreat

And sugars languish

With nothing to do

The fibers in my body dwindle and snap and fray

And I can only sigh, for exhaustion

I try to think on this

I try to rise

I try to do something

But the fingers of my mind are heavy with mud,

I cannot lay hold of any ideas

I cannot grasp them

These ideas

And the solutions to my problems

They slip between my palms

I drop them but they do not splash

They just slide beneath the surface

Into the deep,

And out of reach

Sunk in the stagnant puddle of my mind,

Where ripples are subdued

Until all thoughts are hidden beneath the murk and the duckweed

As good as gone

Down where things decay

Gone

Where they can rot away

These thoughts are not things anymore

But the absence thereof

Exhaustion is to life

What darkness is to light

And what loneliness is to love

Absence

And empty

There is an impact, but it is the dull thud of a body fallen

Where once it stood

Where once it stepped

And dragged itself

Forward

An end to motion

And to emotion

The road goes farther on

But this journey is done.

*

Losing the will to live

Doesn’t mean your heart stops beating

You just lose the will to do shit

The road doesn’t drop, but you do

Eating and shitting are mountains

Speaking, listening, and feeling,

All mountains

Loving and making art— these are mountains

Of bull

And mountains of bills

*

Somewhere between today and tomorrow,

Shit

Will

Get

Bland and tedious and

Fucking exhausting

It might be disease

Or depression

It might be be a hole in your stomach to match the hole in your wallet

Or

It might be the heaviness

Of being an island in an endless sea of people

Or

The worried whisper that none of this shit ever mattered:

A

Day

When

You lose the will to live,

Your heart will keep beating, and your neurons will fire, your lungs will suck and blow

You’ll still get the occasional twitch or hardon or smile

But you won’t use any of these

You won’t lift a finger

Because each finger will weigh like the world

And your eyes will just wilt, for the weight of your lids

So you’ll lie there on the couch or floor or the dirt

And wait for nothing,

Even if it hurts