The art of breathing

Washing my bruised skin in the vestige of Winter sun

I plant my toes firmly into the revolving earth

Grounding me, binding me, no longer

shackling me a prisoner to the rusting chains of this planet

Ungodly black seeds of acid protest viciously in their abundance as they bleed heavily from my newly glowing perception,

kicking and screaming their way into the six foot deep crater before me

There is no longer a metallic proneness swimming irreverently in my cut mouth

staining my trembling teeth and punching toxic holes in my weeping tongue with derisiveness

At first the air tiptoed silently around me,

knocking vigilantly on the creases of my aching chapped lips that were fastened shut with terror,

it waited stoically with clasped hands on the moth-bitten welcome mat placed long ago on my crumbling shoulder, broken like a crystal vase thrown at an innocent wall in the madhouse

It knew the great struggle it was up against when it saw the growing defeat thriving maliciously in the rotting marrow of my diseased bones

when it saw the feeble exhaustion incarcerated in the flanks of my solemn body chipping slowly away at the remaining few fragments of my splintered ribcage

It hoisted itself carefully into the crooks of my corrupted ears, sitting with crossed legs and a cup of tea while lacking exigency, whispering and beckoning with the rough grain of my crucified mind of anarchy to see the light

I opened my bleeding mouth slowly at first, easing it open carefully, my bloodshot eyes forming vast caves of crimson veins and apprehension

The air held my shaking hand and rubbed steady circles on the small of my scarred back as I heaved and choked brutally

Breathing; the process of taking air into and expelling it from the lungs.

I could see the phosphorescence of it glowing and dancing and laughing gracefully around me, it's head thrown back gently with irenicon melodies rendering up out of its mouth like an angel or a connoisseur delivering me a glazed prophecy

The singular essence of being human was curved and flowing around those nine lit up letters on the billboard, the dissolving skeleton asleep beneath my flesh lost or compressed somewhere between B and G.

I gathered together my flimsy alibi and lit the grand paper mache headstone on fire with wavering reluctance, surrendering myself at last to the integrity of the elements, tapping sweet Respiration's delicate shoulder as she spun around to welcome me home.

My hollow lungs cried mercy as I inhaled for the very first time,

my battered heart collapsed to its contused knees to thank me.

The complex breath of air feeding me mortality and braiding my dying atoms with being,

hauling me back from the inevitable cul-de-sac of the other side and lifting me to the almighty zenith, placing me gently like a china doll on a nirvana even Aether himself would dance on

This is no longer an insipid obligation or some sterile task, a chore a hell a burden

This is the rising and falling of my damaged healing chest

This is the steady flow of my cleansed white blood, this is the sound of laughter erupting in the walls of my mending throat

This is the tumbling downpour of human life around us

This is the inhaling the exhaling the living

This, is the art of breathing