A Phoenix Amongst Buzzards

By Tim Stafford
Originally appeard on www.therealedtiion.com

i am a blade, once sharp and direct. i made quick cuts, breaking the fibers of your skin on such a small and unnoticeable level that you never felt the tear. my anger and fear were present even then, they were just so much more focused. i walked tall with an arsenal of disappointment and regret, at war with a world i believed to be standing against me. i existed forever as the victim, fueling my decent. i would not be trifled with, my path seemed to me straight and narrow. over time though, i became blunt, that fatal edge weathered and dulled, that now each time my cut was broad and clumsy, more of a puncture than a slice, each wound more difficult to mend than the one before. you became more and more of a patch work, stitching pieces of yourself back together from the remnants of who you once were. as i would cut, you would mend. we became a shadow and a ghost.

i once believed i was an explorer

blindly going where so many have gone before

deep into the abyss

the blacked out trench

searching for new highs

in the depths of the muck and the mire

but there is no discovery there

what i once thought was an expanse

is an unlit wall that i stare blankly into

for an eternity

i call out

but there is no response

not an even echo

my own voice to banter with

there is only static

how long can someone hold their breath under the pressure of the deep end of the sea? i’ve been there so long claiming independence, calling you the coward, the divisive one. but i am the vermin who can’t release that shiny piece of trash within the hole, trapped by my own gnarled fist. i can’t let go. i don’t even know if i want to. each level of pain can be again covered by this bliss, digging level by level until i am eventually burned away by the fires at the center of the earth. for a lifetime now i have chased that rabbit down the empty hole at the bottom of a glass, familiar shapes twisting into strange and unrealized half truths. nights turn into weeks, that calendar grid skips and hollers as it rolls on in unpredictable waves. routine has become nothing but categorical noise.

i said i can quit whenever i want

you said you’re sick

i said i want to see my boy

you said i want you to as well

i said they told me it’s only twelve steps back

you said my legs are weary and tired of the walk

i said i never meant to hurt anyone

you said yet here we are

i say i’m only 36

you say it ain’t the years, babe, its the mileage

i said i’m sorry

you said so am i

now, i am in need of a razor’s edge. remember, you say, the surgeon’s scalpel cuts, and brings with it the heat of pain. but this incision, it is for your good, cutting away the disease that plagues your tired bones. the surgeon comes to eat your cancer, to bring you back to the land of dead, that you might once again walk amongst the living, no longer as a shadow but as flesh and blood. your son may see you not as an epithet of destruction, but as a face carved into a mountainside. you might become one who overcame, not one who was overcome. a phoenix amongst buzzards.