wrecking ball

The stars are always falling, the leaves are turning brown. The sky is clipped and dismembered, that song that will mean so much more once it is forgotten for awhile. Always scratching after memories, always mythologizing that relentless itch. Post cards and poor performance. The dismal ringing of salutary bells, the statuary so humble and fine. The inference is lifted like fingerprints pulled by tape. A night littered with glass, a heart ringed with exhumed teeth. These kisses are all the same.

You wouldn't know me standing up straight. You wouldn't want to hold me if ever I could hold my own. The gaps in the memory gape, a skeleton's grin. That death's head certainty that the joke is there, regardless of who is left laughing. That stoic mask you wear, knowing that your world will end. Folded letters and loaded phrases, a dozen gimmicked decks all leading to the same sorry trick. All the labor made from this weak dissembly, the burden of filling up the empty with whatever magic you might make. It seems too simple to be true.

The path is dim, though it takes no thought to follow. The way is mangled by these slips and aphorisms. The cage built of words as sturdy as the one built of the bones of birds. Something eases, something is given. The tide is only the dancing of gravitation, an amusement made of tangled orbits and the shiftlessness of water and salt. The pretty little picture, the moment where the water bird pass so high in the sky. The song begins unwinding, and everything is ready to leave. Nothing is wrong, just the lingering ache of living. Nothing is bad, just the startling absence of that enduring love.