The Studier

Seeing my friend, the shrunken one, I wondered if the same fate would befall me, two years down the road. He was the model of gauntness; the frame of his face fought through the mould of his skin, and his skin looked defeated. Was it me or did his eyes look dimmer, more lost, without hope? Smiling seemed a harder pastime to engage in, so too, properly masticating.
Yet within the incessant cropping of the nails with bovine teeth I sensed a growing dis-ease with this whole business of living- like this, bottom to chair, eyes to lines, feet to wards, cycles repeating and clanging overhead like discordant ripples of thunder. As life sinks to making links between the cerebral and the tangible, questions issue from where are no answers, panics hash and rehash where none has yet to exist.

For a season.

While he waits for his deliverance,
I watch the inner lights flicker, and threaten to out.