They're singing in portuguese and the sand has all but settled in your shoes. The songs pass through you, confirming the worst suspicions about what matters. You take a knee, hold your corner. You await some whistle or bell. The fight is in the rounds, and someone is always buying.
What passes for comfort burns in your belly. What stands in for medicine scorches your voice. You speak in slips and tatters, so fragmented by the speed of this drowse that you can't figure out how to get back on the conversation that threw you. Bucks and belts, and songs so heartfelt that even the words you don't know nest right there in your blood. Hectored by your brittle thinking, the shards of thoughts pierce the calm with a native fury, leavening your mind of any reason or rhyme. The sorrowful draw built into your heart smokes and coughs this illness out into the night.
It is always someone else's party, the laughter that rises from some other room. It is the shadows that are obliterated by the turn of a corner, the lovers leaning their secrets into each other, huddled against the resolutions of brickwork and want. It is the glass and then the bottle, and the hole that never heals. It is the dusk and this sickness, the staggered steps towards shelter and the shock of the roadkill cat. The gutter and the remnants of all this rain, the quiet lost so readily when all manner of troubles remain. Losing in angle and intention, losing when the hands are no longer steady, when even the voices in your head quit calling. The flocks that suddenly seem to abandon gravity, leaving the still bones of autumn to linger, endurance always the answer left.
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