flutter

By the late afternoon it is all wind riders, the assembly of sparrows sorting out their urgencies as the band of crows begins to roll up for the day, the bright blues and the ceaseless breeze keeping time with the sun and sky. A pair of nuthatches flit up the front yard tree, clambering up the sweep away limbs chittering about their beat. Swallows work the wind into shapes and continuities, their art play and plunder as they scrub and scale the firmament. There are more than I see, and more than I say. As is the way, there are more things than I have names to stitch them with. As is the way, the words aren’t worried.

The words have all but killed us, loosed our speculative skills into the architecture and the machinery, made our ghosts out to be gods and granted us alibis to our greatest crimes. The coin toss remains the calculator, the soft cautions and the curious enduring could bes, the reoccurring symbols that come is sets of tens or twenties. The extant magic mingles with the made up until we can’t really tell. We become descriptions and definitions, either or entities based on brand rivalries and false hierarchies. Monkey see and monkey do soon outnumbered by all the monkey says. Eternal bargains once you shed your you, screens full of stories instead of earthbound senses. Every prayer a con job, every praise a curse.

I know there’s nothing new here. I know it’s the same old run around. What do you expect— I’m like you, just meat and magnets and sticky stuff that gets all over. We wriggle and we radiate at about the same bandwidth, we flutter about similar frequencies. We all rot and saunter, we make it up as we go along, we play our parts by rote. We seed and sing and pollinate, make up baroque etiquettes then shout proprieties be damned, there’s just no stopping us when it comes to piling on the nonsense. The world is ending, slow and bitterly, walking the long, bad way home after missing out on an anticipated kiss. We could do a lot. We could keep the hoop rolling, the wheel within the wheel. Our baffling antecedents needn’t be erased because we stan the sort of gods they can put in books. Death cults slit our throats and kneel upon the necks of our kin. I scatter a few words over it, like that’ll help.