Finished without a sound.
Broken down
and derelict.
Some say,
you never stood your ground.
Some doubt
the itinerant.
Little bit,
by little bit,
they realize their deficit.
Running with the bit
in their teeth,
feeling the whip,
claiming the championship.
The horse wins the race,
but the owner gets the prize.
This is how it is.
No secret,
no surprise.
Don’t doubt for a second
that you’re running the race
of your life.
He might have had nothing,
but he was free
when he died.
Some men serve,
others sacrifice.
Some will stand,
some will lay supine.
This life is a trap,
the deadliest
that we could devise,
and those who escape it,
get rarer,
and rarer with time.
Slipped off into the night,
like a shadow warrior
after the fight.
No words,
or claims,
or much of anything.
Alone out of the edge,
of a world
that has never been
hospitable to men,
who live their own life.
One day there,
then the next,
a memory.
A ghost,
long before the flesh retired.
So few men exist
out on the edges
anymore.
They’ve all come in,
or are gone for good
this time.
HG – 2020
