eight months

The day dawns like days will do, a band of bright, then all hell breaks loose. The window is still cracked, open to the sky and the wind. The bed even more broken, the dresser and the shelves in their familiar disarray. The time hasn’t flown, it has dragged and drawled over glass and gravel. It has bent the law and broken oaths. Outside the day has begun to fill in the colors, blue sky blue, and the pine boughs green evergreen. I rub my head and work my jaw. Little that would peak pique your interest even if any of your interest remained. Nothing really much at all. Just a stillness and a crawl and the same old nothing much.

It’s another set of insults and injuries. Another cup of what counts as coffee after a night without sleep. Artless and aching and making nothing from a long night’s labors. Scraped and scuffed and never enoughed as the day takes it away. Sore from crown to floor, putting on the old what for as the show just goes and goes. Hexes and charms and noodles for arms as I race the alarm. Head on my pillow, heart in my throat, that’s all you wrote. Everything but the kitchen sink. Everything thing but the straight dope. I can’t even look, you loom so large over this continued desolation. I can hardly breathe, and still you shine and seethe through the fabric of the firmament.

I was broken before this started, broken before you ever made your entrance. All that might and magic, all that ardor and lucre wasted on this wretch. This latest labor has already floored me a few times, cracked me several good ones and loosed dozens of curses down for good measure. I know it doesn’t matter. I don’t mean enough to those I work for now to rate a mention, so the less than nothing I mean isn’t a surprise. But it needn’t be surprising to hurt. The fire doesn’t burn you less because you know it’s hot. So I waste my dreams like I waste my words. In dribs and drabs, in floods and torrents. Salty tears and wished out stars, and never the only promise kept for true.