Another entry from the song meme – my buddy Stan takes influence from U2’s Sunday Bloody Sunday. Check out more from Stan, who is no shit my favorite actor I’ve even seen live on stage at his blog. Feel free to hit me with your own song stories, I’d love to see what you come up with.
Cold Morning – by Stan Peal
The cold air cuts my throat into crystals and I run. The breath is beating like my heart, like my feet, like the thumping at the back of my neck. I can hear them crunching after me. Red glowing splinters through buildings and broken glass. There’s light enough to see me, not enough light to break the cold, but the sun is coming and I can’t stop it no matter how hard I run.
Something green glimpsed in the corner, up from a crack in the pavement. I gave her a flower once and she brushed the leaves with her fingers, that green squeezed under her gentle pressing. Now it’s just a flash, now it’s pushing up between the rocks. She looked at me, I thought she was looking at me, but no she was already gone. The trail of blood out of her lips came too fast. Dripped into the ground.
That door, I know it’s going to give way if I crash it, if I run full into it, beat it with my body, with my arms, my heart is beating and my head is beating and my breath is beating and the cold air stabs and cuts into my throat. Someone yells and a shot cracks the air. The cold empty air breaks in shards before the sun can melt it. I crash through the tenement door and it’s even colder on the inside.
She slept in a room, dark with metal fittings around the ceiling. We studied them in warm afterwards petting and wondering where the pipes go. Cool pipes never rattle, never blow. I can almost picture a smile, but her lips and the blood flows. The pipe bomb slit the air like a razor canon, split sharp and deafening.
Pounding the stairs, the shocks banging through my ankles, my knees vibrating, fear is electric and blood is passion, flesh and gravity are nothing under the pushing of gasping and heartache. I cry out from the pit of my squeezing guts and her moaning echoes in the stairwell. I kick the steps harder and faster to get away, the sweat almost freezing as it comes out, making my own wind in a wake, awakened to a rising of nothing left. Nothing but running. The yelling disappears in their pathetic burying as I fly higher and up the rotting wood, banging and cracking, pounding and echoing, crying and free.
One day the wind caught her hair and she sang. She smiled and opened her mouth to the breeze, her eyes squinting, cheeks up squeezing out the joy, too big for her heart. Her hands flew up and she sang, sang like an angel, smiling too much of a smile to stick to her body, flying in all directions, into the wind and into the sun.
The shaft of sunlight bashes the wall like a battering ram through the window at the top of the stairwell. They’re still coming, stumbling clumsy up the stairs, hopelessly behind, like animals grunting and rooting for a turn at the mush, dirty and stupid. I fly, crashing the glass, cutting red, I don’t care, I’m already free, I’m already gone, flipping through the frame, broken under my back, useless stabs into my hip, I push up from the tiles, painted in white spots from the birds, they know where the sun feeds. Shifting gravity under my feet, I steady my legs and look to the short, corrugated horizon. They’re right behind me. My foot grinds the gravel shingle and I reach for the cliff, sucking in the cold air like water.
I launch into the empty and the sun fills the air. Speeding down into the sky, gravity turns behind me and I feel upside under, finally apart from everything, the cold air sweeping my arms faster and sharper, the wind whistling at my ears higher and higher. The ground is growing, the pavement is coming. I know I’ll crash right through it, splintering through to the other side.
She’s waiting for me on the other side.
She’s waiting on the other side.