Running But Getting Nowhere

How sun-shower of me To be weeping in the bright as bright bites what’s left of wholeness, call it role maybe soul even control Sunny, it stays, with a chance of me. I am a treadmill of a girl legs lit up like a marquee, going nowhere in high definition steadily flickering beyond recognition. The rubber belt whirs in a synchronized scream, a furious sprint through a digitized dream. The odometer counts what the soles cannot keep, while I mimic the terror of running in sleep. The current drops heavy, a circuit-board dread, spinning the system while I rot in my head. A stationary flight through the silt and clay, the gears in my knees match the pressure of stone, an engine idling deep in the bone. The faster I press, the further I plummet where velocity learns to behave like weight. The pace is a trap and the hunger is deep, and the pavement just rises, more brutal and steep. You can tear up the canvas and rupture the heel, but you can’t outmaneuver the spin of the wheel. The white ribbon curdles; the intake goes dry The belt turns without me. I used to run to outrun it, now I just cry. My ribs are the rafters; my pulse is the floor. Why guard a perimeter that isn’t yours anymore? Let the dampness dissolve the enamel and spine the porch is a carcass of copper and brine. The lungs are an engine choking on its own smoke, realizing the distance was only a joke. The skeleton stands as a fixed monument to all the horsepower uselessly spent. It’s all just weather moving through a body, just weather, and I’m in the house it passes through.