shook

It doesn’t matter that the moon’s not out, I can feel it in the rising. It doesn’t figure that your love is gone, I can read it in the stars. The night holding the heat in its heart as the dogs rip the yard apart and the rats run the roofs. The words won’t come, the words don’t quit, the pleasure in the paradox in the looseness of the lips. Sickened with the supernatural, sticking to the storyboard, the bled out labors and the report of spent shells. A lifetime used up being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Every adventure trying to make sure the threat is shook, always in the one where, wishing on somewhere else.

You leave it by the curb to disappear it. You kick them to the curb because you want them gone. The gutters are full of trash and fools whistling away the pain that hasn’t caught up yet. It’s the middle of the night here, or the very early morning. Dull as dirt, reading lamp and fan, old man music shuffling around the room. The trials are small and ordinary, the standard time of heartbreak, the lack and the luck holding hands. Cuts and bruises and the failure of systems and organs. Work that don’t pay in anything but wounds,  an empty habit that digs me in deeper and leaves me on my own, an absence I can’t stop wishing on. The dumb longing for a love that don’t love back.

I am the ghost in the kitchen window backlit by the stovetop light. I am the slouched shoulders and the slack jaw of the local Boo Radley, rustling around in the dark. The running gag and the inside joke whenever I go outside. I stare at the horizon where Orion will soon be rising, I stare at the spot in the tree where the moon used to be, the I’ll Be Seeing You moment where my imagination got stuck. A phrase, a line, a photo from your present where I’m some slip of discarded ephemera, an outgrown moment left to the ravenous past. I slow as the world accelerates, shrinking into nothing in the rear view mirror. A name checked off, a face left to memory, a feeling that has faded from blue to black.