Us, with our intentions fixed upon some inhumanly self-fulfilling abstraction, hoping for change that is humane. In this we are the prime mover of our own cycles.

Heads spewing out rank files, lines like fences herding cattle destined to lift up some sack of flesh that knows how we best must be moved.

The game played within their small vocabulary of strategy, bombs of money dropped brazenly upon already suspecting heads, and the fat dish that gathers and scoops up to hoard all that must be shared.

The fall with its fresh smell of rot, sweet as the perfume worn by bill collectors, their caked makeup gripped to the skull like zombie flesh than moans to consume more brains.

While the bloated eat even more, bragging like boys and their sport, yet too fat to lift their own finger to the field, to play any more. Too fat but to lie, commanding to be fed.

In the season, drown in the shades of red, the little game that grips each mind wins, just as the house must do. A cackling grandma in the glitter of slots. The old dog that rolls and farts to make men wish to please him. The American Dream atop the pinnacle of scarcity, where it must be held for others to lift and climb.

Where the young, who yet dream what they are given, as if it were their own, carry out to fortify all that they would change.

The narrow logic of numbers might count the fallen leaves, strategically noting patterns of distribution. Then, bound by rule, re-cock the gun.

As all the while that which filled us, bleeds out, even as strangers watch and know, because we are all here.

And the furthest imaginative recourse? To cover heads under the familiarity of earth, waiting in our busy tasks for the passing of snowfall — waiting for the spring that must come along upon the Wheel. The pull of a lever. The push of a button. The happy pill.

The fall is arrived. The chill, damp odor of rot, rising fresh from the chaos of that which fell. Just as history reveals.