It isn’t lip service, this scorch in my bones, this fire in the head. It isn’t lip service, the heat that makes the ground crumble and the sand sink. I pick out faces in the dark and I can see into souls like they’re lit up with Christmas lights in the middle of the vast desert. I will follow the light into the darkest caves, the worst streets, into the human dumps where children scramble for the crusts of cardboard sandwiches. I will follow the light where it sucks itself up in a tossup between nirvana and complete annihilation. I will follow the light through the scrapheap where it is crushed and compressed, cracked and shaped, melted and fused without the chemicals of care or proper grieving. I will follow.

If the drums shake my skin off my spirit, will they shake the truth loose too?

I will follow the words until they lead me home. I will follow them until they gut the past, skin the present, and bone the future. When you hang in flanks on the laundry line dripping with vague sorrow like sorry rain that stops every two seconds wondering about its purpose, its worth, its place in all the grasses and plants of the universe and you stretch out towards the parched ground and feel it sucking your will to live away, that’s the moment you seize everything.The moment you realize that you have the power of the rain, the power of thirst, the power to satiate passions and put out fires. The moment before the moment it’s too late. The last possible egress.

Don’t walk outside where the blistering of your skin is the aria everyone has come to watch from the standing room gallery only. Don’t take down the lights or put the dishes away. Don’t look at the moon or tell the hour under your curdling breath. Strike the watch from your wrist. Cut the neck of the snake. Cut the umbilical cord and you cut the source of all light.

Egress is differentiation. Egress is the great tunnel to freedom pocked in the dark with collapse and the will to drill through the bedrock. Egress is everywhere you’re not looking for it. It’s where the best love holds you high but sees your darkest thoughts, loves you anyway. Egress is mining expectation with dynamite.

You have tried to find your way, your path, and you’ve been dreaming over the graves of the lost, the dead, the unvanquished. Tap shoes from the Good Will that don’t fit right, a pinch that introduces awkward rhythms to your dance attempts, they pronounced you ridiculous before you discovered the last possible egress.

The last possible egress will rise while you’re dreaming of doors, entrances,  beginnings.

You always choose, even when you don’t think you’re choosing.

The last possible egress is narrowing every minute you tell yourself you don’t matter, kick your dirty heart into the gutter, trash yourself beyond recognition.

It waits.

Tonight, it waits.