Signs of Slowing

The way we see it’s not a right, it’s a privilege.
To run the world based on whims,
systematically looking forward with ears to the ground
breaking a skull and opening a fracture
spreading contusions like a current 
across a handful of years stretching back and forward 
claiming soft surfaces and stripping away the details
leaving a streak of infected flesh.

Too shy to come out breathing
A broke baby, odd and undersized
the claim of predators, playing at mother 
luring, leaving trails of cheerios.

Swallow and go.

With no signs of slowing

Unnerving, the blistering intake of breath without air;
the consolation parachute
for an infant gaining speed losing altitude,
scared of being hampered by the fickle ground or
of landing in the secret core of a resurrection below
raised up briefly by a revelation learned from the
aging, chain-smoking, Arizona-raised Puerto Rican
given to him by spending time with someone else
accused of cancer, another victim of circumstance
another ostracized mentor with an absent mother in a dense tangle of crises 
because how it works wasn’t working.

If I can just get through this,

I’ll quit for good.