Diminishing Way
It was never a cleansing rain, the mammoth clouds brought to dark extinctions,
nothing breathed back into a former life, just wet against bone, really:
eating through threadbare layers, awake with the dumpster diving coons,
a concealed blade for when the shrill of the world came shrieking,
the cap of the bottle loosened to provide a burning warmth upon the gut,
that rattling belly of starvation that hummed upon the electrical box,
thoughts atom-smashed together and dulled to a resilient survival.
To be invisibly alone is not what bothers, little does as the clocks
of order disappear, retreating to the inside world, that warm place
of kind remembrances that fade, washed away with the teeming showers,
that gully of wet that batters a man as if he is a mound of sunken clay:
arms and legs in starving spasm, the form unwatched and less distinct,
squeaking soles soaked through, laced on clumsily by trembled hand.
Friends disappear with personal advantage, family to more promising obligations.
Friends really? Family by anything other than a cooling blood? Such arguments
can be had by those still fit to argue; the preening indoors
of many dry comforts that still find hardships and a waning endurance.
With dryer sheets in the pant legs and a fridge of faltering choices.
Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author who lives in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many bears that rifle through his garbage. His work has been published both in print and online in such places as: The New York Quarterly, Red Fez, Evergreen Review, The Literary Underground, Horror Sleaze Trash, Rusty Truck, Zygote in my Coffee, and The Oklahoma Review. He enjoys listening to the blues and cruising down the TransCanada in his big blacked out truck.
