Mining for Gold
Lumbering down the mouth of the cavern, the prospector drags his browned pickaxe from its beak and grates his grey teeth together and rushes along so his denim curls down to his ankles. Gray-wisped scavenger looking for some treasure in a place that has none—there exists no last-ditch salvation that will turn around his failure of good life. Whipping a fat crack of his companion's steel nose in the flat stones is the only noise that tempers his own; the shuffling of his footsteps forgotten in the clamor of his actions—what was, erased by what is.
Oil lanterns slick tongues of yellow in the otherworldly bowels and deeper he ventures desperate for his reward so that he may leave this place and never return. His heels crack his foot up to his toe and his eyes droop where his brain is a slave to this Hellscape. Itches and scratches in the mudstone rip open his clothes and leer for the paled skin that begs for Sun forgotten; so the life that had been his so long ago was stolen before he had realized, and his body turned an enemy that eats itself from its own ambitions.
Tracking off the final light and leaving to his life engorged in the darkness, he slams and rakes and flails his tool now an extension of his body that he only labor with fury to break it finally and it may never be his again. Let him crack this evil work apart and he can be free—violent motion that sources from new energy in old joints and weathered muscles that hope and desire and plead some higher power for salvation from the prison of his own making. The pickaxe flies around and chips for some golden release and scrapes dust to the nose and flings debris to the eyes.
Sweat wraps his forehead and the pitch black has him focus on his ramping body heat that licks the insides of his eyes and flushes out all his air. His moving body slows to a pendulum trance and he lifts his instrument and faithfully drives it down—he catches his breath with each slam, hoping that each try would end his servitude once and for all. His feet slip as he digs into the Earth and his knees buckle under his weight with his spine arching out the skin of his back. More and more he rings the ground with his false arm, wanting the world to know that he existed in some way, that his dishonor did not change his place in this plain—he was here, and he will fight for what life is left.
His stomach builds with acid and lungs drip with blood; heavier he throws his arm and deeper into the underworld he travels. Great swings have the metal bounce and vibrate on soft stone as though unbreakable; one more time, he drills his life-force into this action and a faint crack patters round the head of the pickaxe. Pausing to check if he had heard incorrectly, he sees a break in the material and eyes dilate to pinholes. He slams the piece with force inhuman and lets his spirit so hungry for freedom take hold, the echoes of tearing metal his call to the outside world.
A fateful throw round his head and the device that ensnared him had split itself apart. Huffing with child-like passion, he steps away from this ritual site and clambers back to the cave’s entrance; lunging and lurching past lanterns lit with misplaced fire, he runs and sprints and gallops to his outside, and outside that could show him something a cave never could.
He looks on the nightly sky and starlight that bathes his world in a heavenly glow, and he falls to his knees, supplicant to the wonders of creation before him.