I'm sitting on the tongue of a wild beast--

The red rasp stained like concrete when children scape their knees.

I can't fall. I know I can't fall again,

because I'm terrified to see the bones underneath--

Those bones same as me, when I let me be picked clean,

thinking I was strangled by meat.

Now? Unbelievably grey. That's what I am.

My face is like ash, dry and pale since I let it suck me dry,

an ugly color in its colorlessness, left behind by the tongue of the beast.

That tongue is red with my everything--

The everything which I had let go because it was heavy,

and now I'm nothing but anemic bones collecting dust.

I sit atop the tongue of a wild thing that lives

for world of inconsequentiality--

The one that's too real, beyond real, and not real at all.

If I were dragged down and away,

and unable to give it my everything,

where would that everything go?

Would it go completely nowhere, because it had been born incomplete,

or would it go everywhere all at once,

leaving me with more buzzing nothingnesses, killing me with their stings?

With this sanguine beast--

The thing I rode in as not a queen, but a pawn... what am I?

Its unwitting harbinger, the apocalyptical horseman of my own demise?

Is there anything in it, or me, that could make up for this wasted time?

I wonder and wonder still, clinging to this blood-red razor.

It runs and runs--

The beast to which the saw-tooth tongue belongs.

It leaves behind it globs of my everything,

which continuously leak from myself and its jaws like liquid hunger,

and with the drops go my memories, which only I seem to forget.

It gallops across an endless desert without oasis, and the tongue--

The rasping tongue I sit cross-legged atop, it is never quenched.

Not by my everything, or the everythings of those before me,

who have become pounded to sand beneath its feet.

Should I fall, I know I would die.

I would become drier than I ever was, husk that I am now,

but part of me fears. Part of me fears becoming the sand.

As there have been millions of me before,

there will be billions of me after, and they will all make the same mistakes.

We all sit upon the same tongue of the same beast,

and none of us want to see we are bones,

drained dry and left weak for the fear--

The fear of everyone forgetting our everythings,

which we ourselves were born too weak to hold on to--

The fear that our everythings will lay scattered in the desert,

adding to the long and winding trail of discarded spittle that leads to naught but a beast--

A beast that moves and runs and goes but nowhere.

A beast that will never go anywhere but the inconsequential places,

because the people that ride it,

we too quickly become bones,

and we can only see where it is we are going in glimpses brought to us by things like silly poems,

either by writing them or reading them,

and our glimpses last only as long as the world is allowed to glimpse us.

I fear this is not long enough for me,

because I want to be more than grounded bones,

but as I sit here,

blood-bleached and grated,

hollowed-out and serrated,

I make that very same mistake I warn us against.

Even as I write this, I stare hopelessly at the ground,

so paralyzed by my own worst nightmare that I can’t see the beast is running in circles,

and that it has been since the beginning.