tear

Ghosts cast of grocery bag plastic roll through the deep blue shadows of the dawn. The haunted ribbons of asphalt and river silt, the strange escapades of a morning wind. Somehow everything is unsettled, misspelled and left askew. The burnt out match and the fleeting ashes. The library of echoes that confuse tongue and speech, that trade glisten for hearing, the fumbled deck and misplaced spoon. This is always where the trick goes wrong. This is the perfect passing sphere of intemperance, that lost droplet that will inherent every ache and joy. Salt streaked flesh painting the day in hints of silver and storm.

Day in, day out: it is the same old thing. Everything slowly fading into shape as the possibilities diminish and the imagination starves. The strafing of familiar streets with diluted sunlight, the sinking of each hope into some ready flesh. The moon slashes some narrow stretch of wanting, a sickle made from the absence of shine. That moment is missed as soon as it is uncovered. The skin raised, chilled to gooseflesh.

It was there the very moment it occurred to me. It had been there before-- that seemed certainty itself. The door creaks wide, swinging in oaken slowness. The crack in the heraldry sorting out the grain. Where there was that nightmare, now only slow notions and poor seconds. The mirror in pieces, that face all that is left. I knew it in an instant-- all that was there now tears.