Floorboard

My weary muscles built this world

for you and me,

cobbled together every brick, mixed cement,

plastered slowly

and with care.

Calloused hands created skyscrapers

which reached into the depths of the sky

and pulled out the hearts of plummeting clouds,

pulled light from the sun itself,

hands burning but determined.

Each moment, every movement

marked by shame, a slow erosion

a stagnating excitement, bleeding out

a painful standstill

where the liquids pile high.

My weakness makes me nauseous,

and you see that before these concrete monuments.

You see my cracking hands before noting what they made,

just as I do,

tapping the walls and searching for flaws,

my dwindling courage lost

to the sharpness of your magnifying glass.

The good in this life just can’t overwhelm the bad

anymore,

and my refusal to drown now seems increasingly silly,

increasingly ridiculous, less brave by the minute,

how can it be defiant to prolong your own suffering?

Maybe it is best to let these buildings fall,

to let them drop back over the concrete

stained red by my many mistakes,

merging with the blue of every meandering mood

and the distant, onlooking sky.

With a jolting twitch, these muscles admit their cold defeat

to overbearing lactic acids, eating away at any sense of hope.

How can one hope in a world that devours its future

with the excitement of a starving animal

finally arriving to a gluttonous feast?

Why continue to step forwards

when the person in front

is removing every floorboard?