Turning

I feel the wheel turning inside me in the stretches of almost every moment. Its fiery composure combs over each individual emotion that comes into its gaze. All within its reach meets the wheel, it burns softness into steam and melts resolve into coal. The spokes are aflame eternally, each inch soaked in oil. By lantern light I’ve walked so many miles, through rain and snow and ash and war with bones aglow almost from radiation it would seem. I can feel the wheel turning now. It begs and pleads with me to stretch out in the last few minutes of the sun’s impetuous descent. I can hear it smolder just beneath the surface of a thin and brittle frame. Brittle in comparison to what the wheel wants for me. It wants to be mauled by many lovers if not gored to death at the hands of one it’s picked out in particular. I think it chokes on not getting what it wants, I think it spits out limbs that do not fit inside this vessel it’s been crammed into, contained in but the body of a man. I think this thing was meant for someone carved from marble by the men that came before me. I think this object set into perpetual motion moves too slowly for its own liking, its own comprehension. I think that it falls flat of expectations that it places on itself, it was born to bleed out any situation that it found. It is something warborne and gritty, stained over several centuries with sword and shield and halberds, of princes and poets and paupers. The wheel cannot be told no, or else I am contorted from the inside, organs ground down against the ribs that fit just barely. These intestines with their never ending loops are looped and tied around the outer edge and tighten, right up to where both fists are balled. I want the things it wants. I need the things it needs and what it wants and what it needs are things that men like me do not find easily. I uproot the trees I come across, I turn up stone and turnip both and claw through riverbeds in search of them. The siren is the thing it seems. The song with notes and tones that chill the bones and plead with me to sleep inside the drink. To walk with feet and tongue in cheek into the current til it coats my coat and pulls me out to where I cannot float nor swim. The wheel wants to be put out. It craves a quick extinguishing, in anguish it would seem is how it lives its days. I listen for the tune that tells a rotting body like my own which way to go but when I find the naked flesh there at the end, it’s Mother Moon that answers with her light draped softly on the wrong thing. I want what it wants. To lay beside a certain plucked and picked out tulip where the river meets the ferns and fronds. There where the logs are bent and broken, where the grass comes up to your knees and sap sticks to your skin. I need what the wheel needs. To traverse and to transcend, from single bodies that have met to singularity. The fallout being wheel meeting wheel, fire meeting fire, spokes breaking up against each other and a moment soaked in peace. I can feel the wheel turning, I can hear when it cries out, in its responses to the song it heard not many nights ago.