The walking stick stabbed at the pavement like a dagger. His scruffy black shoelace less shoes dragged along the cobblestone, inch by inch. The wind blew like a hurricane at his front, like it were holding him back, like he were an escapee and the hell hounds wanted his soul stuck behind unquenchable bars of hunger.

Each step had him grasping at something, but hardly cutting his gums, teething at the sickly world beyond. His crippled hand reached forward, as if trying to penetrate the void, to get in behind it all, to the source of things that went away and would again come. His forefinger at a breaking point, pressing into the cold dark night beyond.

But there was a futility about the battle. The scars were his robes, blackened as the darkness around him. Ripped and torn, flapping aimlessly in the gusts of change. The weapon his will, flung over and shouldered into countless wars. Cradled to sleep in the trenches thereafter, a saving grace and a sharpened steely blue eyed glare that pierced deep.

Reaching, striving, yet forever a fingernail away. But it was there. It was a breath from the lungs, a thought from the minds penetrating eye. A slither of a pencil sharpening from drawing blood on this new map of the world. It poked and prodded at a dreamscape, at the land of the free. All the while the withered body thrashed in the ruins under the impermanence of the rising tides of the fleshy sea.

It was a folly to think beyond the fight. To hope for the light at the end of the tunnel, not attached to a freight train of severe karmic comeuppance. As the hands of time were lost or found in the stretching of the soul's engine, each chug another hearty pile of coal steaming forward into the unknown abyss.

And that very fight, the seemingly infinite bout of getting absolutely nowhere but everywhere all the same. Stuck in being stuck, in the shadow realm of a deep yearning ambition. A fruitless Eden to taunt the soul. As if you weren't free to enjoy it as it were, instead as a future shaped into a golden key, as a large pickaxe slowly pecking away at the chains of destiny.