skitter

Night falls and the web swaddled bulb draws a crowd, a mob of arthropods floods the porch and walls, busy with the work of the world. I await a signal, a sign of the prophecy meted out by a perennial friend as the expectation expires the way they usually do, in clear, cold facts. Fireworks abound, the dog gone crazy in his now daily way, knocking down doors and burrowing behind furniture full of mad panic. Moths and mosquitoes move in minor multitudes, innumerable before this innumerate fool, all but blind outside the pooling light. The foretold rolled back, the house all a skitter with creep and critter, I gather my infinite ingratitude and return to the busywork at hand. 

The Great Bear held the sky above, another single light lit ceiling stretched out for my endless contemplation, as panicked dogs press their trembling bodies against and I set down more words. I write these sweet and sour nothings down out of some keening I cannot quell, as well as the usual longing to be heard. But mostly it is the sense of doing something, these slow sad soliloquies making note of these foolish, wasted days. Turning the words over and over. Saying I’m here and so long all at once. Selfish, stupid heart and bitter, baseless tongue steeping the static with some semblance of the scurrying poisons stirring in my skull. Some beautiful song I cannot capture and will never sing. Some notation on the space taken up by this unformed entity.

Despite my hiss and spittle of despair and alienation, people are mostly kind towards me. The madness and the impoverishment are showing most of the time now, though it’s hard to tell when you’re an unreliable narrator and only talk to yourself. It was a hot day and is a warm night, and a nervous dog now dozes hot against my hip. I lay on my back as beaten air bumps into me intermittently, too little, too late. It’s all charity towards a pitiful wretch and invective launched from a safe distance, all banal and brutal and perpetual blues. A eulogy, an epitaph, the endless work of worms.