f-stop

The big damn moon posts halos in the thinner, wispier clouds, scrolling an impermanent O above us all. Not a trial by fire, but by smolder, this last ash hour held tight, balled up inside my heart. Wind chime music with so little wind, spattered asphalt with so little rain. Preposterous people doing preposterous things. All the world a stage just when theater is becoming a ghost town art. All the words in the world will not change a thing. People stay what they were made, and think that this is freedom.

After awhile the burden has to leave old Doctor Frankenstein. Bereft and cast aside, there is still the rest of the world before the monster. Wreck and ruin are only one choice here. The law of the jungle was written in towers safe in the pretty distraction of the city. Alibi written for an appetite for crime while the beasts survive together, with heart and mind and eye as much as tooth and claw. Hobbes and Rousseau both coddle far from the ruckus of the working soul, adding silt to the river of inventions, words estranged from the wheel of the world.

I idle, inflicting each particular poison in its favored dose. The sickness creeps through me, shadows cast out into the light. The hour changes, the light shifts, the aperture adjusts, but the picture is never pretty. Creases and scars, blues and fervors, love letters and salty laments. Smoke curls, leavening distance with bitter kisses. The moon casts its spells of madness and angels, making beautiful music before drowning in another measure of rain. Talking to myself, still speaking out of turn.