The Weight of Nearness

I have studied your habits from a careful distance enough to induce emotional shiver. It is a space in which nerves synchronize their preliminary distress. The flickering differential between a strike zone and chilled resignation toys with the survival instincts of elite soldiers. How much more frayed are the senses of wage laborers? Now fetch a glass of water at once. Not for your comfort do I command this, but for my ease. Rest it on the nearest tree stump. It is the smallest curtesy you can pay to an emissary from a burning city. I hail you with the anthem of our screaming children. There is no map that can prepare you for the texture our geography unless you have marched in a stratum of coagulated blood. The lightness of a frontiering right foot sinks five inches with contact while the compensatory left step drills down to eight to stabilize your terrified wobble. You don't know our regional dialect and I know your favorite brand of dental floss. Our dead are bound up in the roots of saplings. They have ruined the network of badgers. Your assassins resent the humble application of a shovel. They make it a point to let all know their trade lies elsewhere. No matter where you go I am twelve Mississippi's from your last repose. History has made us your partners in a way that can not be dispatched with a wave of inhuman violence. I report back to the camps of your hard edit, and they belong to a single mind. Every weapon you use to sever ties with our names, food, songs, and drapery only bonds us together. We do not wail out of the confinement of torture chambers but from behind the masks of welders. Sneeze and our mothers will hold your nose. Pray and our elderly will stand outside of your gates as a sea of unblinking amens. Shower and our infirmed will towel you. Half of every holiday you celebrate will be dedicated to a circumvention of our pacing unemployed fathers. When you realize the terms of our union and beg for death, I will load the gun.