Dancing With Consequence in And The Rest.

I slide through the gaps between midnight and dawn; daylight is rough sunshine-twine safety, tying me down and constraining, a captive in cuffs of reality.

Alone in the night and the steel-staple stars all fall out of the sky; ripped from its rivets it ripples around me in gossamer rivers of syrup and tar, silver-salted with frost and worn close as a cape. Sitting on the precipice wrapped in the swathes, a suffocation or salvation, a speculation; contemplation or capitulation.

Bare frozen feet kicking crisp onyx air, swinging toes stretching to taste the temptation, glazed glass eyes gazing out empty and obsidian into oblivion. Leaning in to the sea-breeze that sweeps up the cliff-face; leaning in to the view from the edge. The lights of the city smeared in thick oil-paint slicks on the bruised smoked-glass surface of the seascape; refracted, retracted, rearranged and reassembled; repositioned in rhythm by the circular swell of the cold currents breathing beneath.

My storm-petrel soul is a sea bird, it just wants to fly.

Stretch tethered tattered wings wide, embrace the night sky and fly with gravity, air and speed scraping skin and the wind-tunnel rush blurring vertical vision in striations and streaks; one plummeting breath long enough to be infinite, endless, an ending. Spearing the silver-screened surface and flying forever through liquid depths dark as a cassis liqueur; dissolved in the solution and drifting apart, unaware.

A damaged tanker drowning, defacing the sea, I spill pooled poison oil all around me, bleeding smothering circles of tarred toxic ink, eclipsing reflections, washing over the waves. Gluing together the feathers of my fraught flightless soul, petroleum plumage bound thickly with sticky black honey and useless; washing up shadows in the shallows of the lives that surround me, shorelines rotting like gangrene and silver sand swallowed by dark diesel depths.

Another lost night slowly sliding the spiral, staring into possibility; another lost night balanced right on the edge.

That view from the edge, it was all that I wanted.