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There’s just not enough people in the world to keep everyone company, always. Some just have to deal with it for a time: cold as winter birds at the circle’s edge. The omni-social warmth gets reserved first for everyone with the gifts to earn it easiest; who – as to be expected – having been spoiled by the heartbeat for as long as memory necessitates, forget to take turns; and the ungifted, their wait in the frost extended into Antarctic years bleeding ever whiter, feel that continental waiting shift and their icy horizons crack like glaciers. Deprived of a break, they fracture and days become image-split and time-stuttering – consciousness: kaleidoscopic to it’s very edges and impossible to remove from the eye’s sight, even by the resolve of suicide. The arching bells that blot the transparent lenses with black, shallow, un-departing, escape-shaven coats of painful, experiential fact toll more truly than those of the heartbeat’s uninterrupted embrace will – or can – or would ever want to take it upon themselves to know – let alone try to help.
Adam Crawford is a writer of poems and short stories. His work has been published by Ink Babies Lit Mag, Poetic Anarchy Press, and The Pomegranate London. He lives in Simi Valley, California.
The kind of poem that chills the heart and the body...