Friday, March 26, 2010

breath and boil

Memories slowly boil away, changing states as they are warmed by the cool morning air. Where there was rain there is now starlight, where there was green there is now a night's worth of unabiding gray. It is ever too dark or too bright, always almost and even when certain never quite. I lost a day to old bonds and chaos, broke a few secret rituals and yet another promise to myself. I would keep score, but these thoughts weigh too much for the hour and for my status, and memory is such a fragile and fruitless thing.

Instead I make my mark just leaning into the mix. The business of sorrow, the clarity of joy, the realistic lies of language and art. I watch for marks, read the cracked ground for any trace or clue. Observe all the usual comings and goings, the changes and the sameness, the happenstance and definition of the inside and the out. Bird or bat, star or planet. All the satellites orbiting and becoming one another. One breath, and then the next.

Out here amid this residue, out here where complexity aches so, we wait even as we wander. The stories and the facts, the dreams and the steps, the aim and the exhalation of the shot. The old gods so shoddily abandoned, the grim new ones that ought to be treated just the same. Lost souls and letter writers, thieves and snipers and crummy poets. The architecture of the carnival and the garden, the path made with no illusion towards permanence. We are so lovely and so evil, so very nearly forgotten. All the grimy confessions, all the night-terror awakenings, all of the stories everyone is so afraid of that the pretend to lose them in bus stations and in shopping malls. They are always so close to being lost forever, that they are resurrected without a thought as to why. Always something novel and thrilling, stolen from the cheap dissolution of oaths misspoken and the sort of things no-one ought to say.

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