Burnt Sugar and Carbon Resign

A dusty engine, oil and grease slicked, covered in a suffusion of hay-dust and grime.

Once the engine raced down some salty black tarmac, baked in the hot summer sun, hanging high in the noonday sky.

The engine sits on cinder blocks, sheltered by some vestiges of metallic bodywork as an impartial rain snivels down. Somewhere in gently resonating metal memory of the once thundering cylinders a sweet refrain hums.

I am that engine.

Who would have thought that some seemingly innocuous event would have sent my daily rhythmic processes spiraling and whipping about so violently, like the severing of the support cables from a vast crane, bearing a heavy load. The cables lashing wildly from the break of the tension to cut, slash and tear whatever may be in its immediate vicinity; the cargo sent tumbling hither and thither to smash, crash and destroy its self upon the earth below, precious bits of broken things skittering and sliding, crying shatters and weeping cracks as shards and slivers of luminous blown glass bottles and vials of brightly pigmented ink vanish-- glittering before they are consumed by shadow-- from the spotlight of the cranes' one unwinking lamp eye.

Though to say that the event that triggered this catastrophe is innocuous would also be fallacy, but even so, to suspect the repercussions would have been so wide spread was somewhat unimaginable.

Since the great fall of my lovers visitation rights, since the great bureaucracy dream abortion, my life is akin to living in a small crepe paper hut within my mind-- the walls so thin yet impenetrable.

I see photos of my friends, my associates and in their shining faces a thousand promises and potentials, youth, virility, ambition, curiosity and life.

In my own reflection I see morbid flesh, sleepless nights, aching joints, malnutrition, diffidence, and jaded death.

Perhaps my physical ailments are a good cornerstone of my predicament, as it is well known that which ails the body, ails the mind; that which ails the mind, ails the body. But with the whirlpool of ailment begetting ailment, where do I start? A knot of problems and all of them connected, a massive web crumpled and tied.

My back aches, my joints ache so I do not wish to move, because I do not move I am not sufficiently tired by the come of eve, or am simply tired by the boredom of my day, so I sleep unsoundly, because I am tired come the next day I do not wish to go out and see things, I do not wish to experience the rich world I live in, because my mind is so dour I do not want to work on anything because I feel I have nothing good to produce, nothing of merit to give. And my joints ache, and food I cannot eat for pain in my innards, and sleepless nights I have...

And I see my friends fully drinking deep from their own personal springs and I am struck with envy.
Why cannot I partake of my own oasis?
Why am I no longer moved to joy at the prospect of productivity and creation?
Has sedentary melancholy so deeply seeped into my bones?

I recall, fondly, with golden tones and accents upon it's playback, the last semester here. My heart pumped, my fingers fervently drummed, the words flowed, the scripts taken and filmed, ink and pen prolific, opportunities ripe, the nights late, the revelries grand, projects abundant, all six cylinders roaring the call of a thousand bulls tearing down the highway in a mad stampede.

Now I spend day after day, night after night at home doing nothing, ache by ache, fiber by fiber deteriorating till nothing but a skeleton, animated by sinews and ligaments with a cigarette firmly clasped between its' teeth remains.

I have most certainly fallen into the stickiest of sand traps.
Like the problems and hang ups in my scripts, I can see all the issues and problems in my own existence and situation, I simply don't know how to fix them, or rather where to start. It's funny how my artistic and life-realistic problems mirror each other, at least a little, anyhow.

Where did my life go? Where did my ambition go? Where did joy fly off to without a forwarding address? Where did all of those fuels of my life run off to without a forwarding address, let alone a goodbye?

To say that his being kept from me was the catalyst, I suppose even that is a lie. I had been hiding a lot at home anyhow, saving money for his immanent arrival. The slowing of the engine, the holding of the clutch for the peel out at the streetlight.
And then the light never changed. Or perhaps, for a second, it did, and I pulled out into the intersection, only to realize it was a trick of the mind and now disoriented I sit in the intersection as countless cars mercilessly bear down on me, unsure of how proceed or to get back to the place I was before.

I've been told countless times that you cannot go back to being a person you once were before, especially if your heart is broken, you can only move forward. But...I liked that person I was, I don't want to continue down this path any longer, so how do I proceed? I can't just sit here, I refuse to sit here.
And, much akin to brilliant flashes of light reflected and rainbowed from a sun-catcher, occasionally, very occasionally, I feel invigorated and motivated, to write, to draw, to dream, to create and produce and again lift my head to the sky with ardor and vigor, to have the strength of character to see what I desire and scrape and scratch and claw and work tirelessly to obtain it, to hold my aspirations realized in my hands with mad, wild pleasure and laugh ecstatically to the sky--

And then my back hurts, and with the sharp whip of physical ailment my passion is tamed. I crawl back to bed. I read a book. Watch a film. Stare at the walls. My passion leaks quietly out of me from a worn laceration, scabbing over slowly to hold in just enough fire to again make my eyes shine with desire, my muscles tense, my pulse jump slightly faster, my heart warm when I look at the sky and its limitlessness.

All I can hope is that if built myself into this mental minefield-- if that is truly the case and it is not my dwindling body weight from other physical complications-- that I can dig myself out.
Somehow.
Somehow soon.

My spirit or my body will irreparably break otherwise.