You wrestled against the clutches of brothers and cousins, etched lessons in your muscle, broke tendencies, rerouted synapse with unwritten chapters entitled, Risk, Pain, and Tolerance. Though pale and tender as your own, you clawed your way into their flesh; red scratches and waning moons of bruise. You carved a language of ferocious prey and warning but more startling than the DNA that curled from under your nails was the power which made you surge, the breathless current of survival that ran like a lightening rod through the center of your axis as you spun in and out of years knowing blood tracks would either catch up with you or become abandoned to faster byways and untranslatable modes. So you walk, never looking over your shoulder, one step in front of the other, past the fermenting bumper crop yard-fruit. Never mind the dirty shoelace untied, the frayed, grey string dangling over the trestle bridge track. You need this grip of heat, the hot rail under your feet. It’s like the static warmth the addicts wear like skullcaps, the chokecherry buzz after needle pierce and plunge. Keep your hair blown back, baby, and charged with the horizon line. Ignore the periphery of prison men in orange. Their 40 ounce cans and spent shells are their business not yours. Disregard the jackrabbit carcass and its fur which still clings but will sail away soon like dandelion seeds. Remember it’s not a charm and their sentence is not your sentence; you can’t do that kind of time. Keep going, never say, it’ll all blow over someday because lies like that scatter, fade, sink back to soil. They’ll transform into fragments so sparse, so swallow-drunk, the next generation will skip the deciphering stone, misspell the story of you, digitize and archive it on some pixelated and odorless, dot com.