owed

Hour after hour drags the day to a halt, the going from known to known, the abrupt, expected changes. Weeds grow, dust gathers, the smoke comes and goes. The graces are given what they’re owed. The shadows spill from the substance, light building up to the side, another steady shove from the sun. Worn and ragged, propped up like a Halloween scarecrow upon bones worn to wisps and aches, the gracious radiance from pain to pain. The winds take whatever they can, the altar takes what gets left. The deft irrelevance of the build.

The neighborhood is mostly neutral, with significant build ups of good and evil down the days. Troubles are the native tongue upside the heads of gently settled and the hard living alike, how they scale and how they’re solved the whole lexicon. Beat the drum, walk your beat, work the clock. Nurture your lawn or invoke repercussions, the weeded desolations signaling a dangerous lack of decorum, as if the neighbors ever know. The song reverberates down the street, bouncing between houses, bending with the wind. Something always carries, something always stays.

The winds rise and the skin cools, a little shiver across the shaven scalp, a gripe here and there mixed with cuts and nicks usually along the knuckles and knees. All this animal appetite, all this coded schema, the poem always somehow a precipice long buried. The words retort again and again, the steps and the railing, the sticking to the grid. The engine always assembling, the purpose always at a turn, praying making scripture on the go. It takes more than is there, exchanges currencies and passions, roots to the stars. You take a breath and add to the aura.