open book

Cover to cover, the book is finished. Page by page, the next one begun. The days start and stagger, the nights bleed and blend. These worlds are all rewritten, series and sequels, blank screens and palimpsest. Words recycled, meaning and motive always chasing tails. Alibi always the next confession, reason always stacked as the memoir is spent. Life is a mystery, dust and smoke, wet streets and days of rain. The movie playing with the sound turned down. The music always another soundtrack, a playlist of all the things you thought you'd never hear again. The songs you sing while the radio drones on and on.

Trains wailing and dogs barking. The weather leaves the atmosphere and lingers on your lips. Life is a mystery, lived in one direction, written in reverse. The butler's heated confession, the voice in the dark lit in silhouette. Time is a story we tell ourselves to believe in the numbers while the clock runs down. The metaphors meet up at the mixer and breed like wild. Kisses and gunshots and those plots fraught with comical mistakes. You watch what you say because you think someone is listening. You wait to speak while all the words exhaust. Write it down, sleep on it, read it out loud. The sense in the sentence is stitched to your heels. Running so hard it feels like flying. Flying so far, the fall is all that is left.

For awhile we will meet and measure. For awhile we will burn so bright. Alone at last we think and smolder. Alone at last the story seems clear. Road after road we miss our exits. Page after page our purpose obscures. The denouement a sad abstraction. The epilogue another shambling ghost. These lives of ours an open book. Remaindered long before it was ever written. That sound and fury the only signifier. Clues and characters and drawn out conclusions. Concussion and punctuation, and all that drowned romance. The sun comes up, the sun goes down, we tell on all our stories. We close the book on all our secrets. Life's a mystery the only thing we learn.