Whip

United States
September 2026

A strange vulnerability drowns me in disdain. The belief that I alone captain my ship offers no hope since it sailed last. Crows caw and peck at my writhing soul, bursting with ambition but bleeding, seeping in an impossibly thin ocean where I've been tossed aside. You threw me off somewhere between youth and yearning. The stones below were broken and pointed, collapsed from the path just back beyond the hill. Something crept in the crevices, seeping to seethe in between, a structured bond succumbing to the neglect of the averted eye. And you saw no need to strap me down. There's no more use for a questioning dilettante of perception I suppose. The trend set destination of that carriage carries on, with tarries gone by the withered way of yesterday's intent and a past undenied, yet never realized because the call again came to huddle for abstraction. And hustle for distraction, a project of invented passion impressed in each visage, morning after nightmare's dawn, a daybreak adreamt no longer announced by heartbreak of ambivalent toil for the careless and soulless holding the reigns. Your hands are essentially soft in obligation, runaway knows no gristled grip, little tightened strain that isn't effervescent pain of progress which begets another's gain. We wrestled for the seat in this chariot of charades that it might hoist us from a thorny thicket where we grapple to fend off our infinite wolves, the demons, the impish infiltrations forcing a festered belief in something better achieved only through our own discontent, our collective lament of singular voices and unscrupulous bombast aimed at all those who dwell perilously in the mist, all under your ambivalent eyeshot whose shriveled ethos compels the battle but always shies the fight. What we've burdened ourselves to know is nothing if not never enough, and our bonds bear no stress for your distracted minds whose distinctly distant lives bother us only and always in the frivolous pursuit of that which you couldn't rob outright the first lap. Or maybe the second too. Could also be a third, right?, another slight of requisite insignificance whose brambles scrape doubly in each reach for escape. I tumble again in grace with throngs of hearts oozing in despair that we might not yet be beyond repair, our tattered tongues and limp clothes fluttering your distant dialect. Not so fast with that glassy gaze, heaping on the pointed praise of those again wishfully undermining their own sacred desires in lieu of mundane opportunity manifested by your hopeless haze. I wonder if this once, this last go will be the first I see beyond, where I'm certain I've lain before lest why would I yearn so for the unknown, but never sufficient to surrender this cascade of doubts pouring forth, crimson and pure. No, my passion doesn't lie here, not slithering that path between the stones, nor heaving in wretched breaths squeezed from deep within. It is my pride, my future, my pursuit, released in a drop, and another, here and again, every time I must until I'm forgotten, not by the world, but myself.