You never notice the first few.
They slide in - almost a practiced, practical ease - and hit their marks.
You don't feel those.
It's the next soft touch that drives the full complement home.
What was a flicker catches - a dry fire - spreading faster than you can breathe against it.
This is marrow-changing flame. A deep soul-itch that burns, burrows.
Scorched earth yielding no hope of regrowth, or rebirth.
(As if regeneration were possible from these charred nerves.)
This isn't a miry pit - although somewhere, deep you know that's there too.
This is an incessant, all-consuming integumentary wheeze.
In a pause,
On the shift of a wind, the memory of a scent.
Its half-whisper evoking what feels like a Green fantasy, so far from the here and now.
But it grows.
And sinks deep,
settling against these dry bones with the promise of distant thunder.
