12/23/23

a trail of white feathers guides me through the understory, where honeysuckle clothes naked stalks of poison oak and ivy swallows tremulant fingers of licorice fern. a talon leaves marks in reddening down; death leading life, life chasing death. a solitary seagull slips into the veil of nothingness and i am alone, pockets filled with bloodstained bird, nose with the silvery musk of spent mugwort. cliffs on all sides drop into oblivion: past, present, unknowable, irrelevant. fool that i am, i follow the dead, and step into a future i cannot see.