ossify

 The light was late in leaving, the ash was thick and expansive, the drum machine ran off a beat in record time. Here there was smoke, here there was water, a sip and a swallow and a host of flies. The sheen of sweat the weight of sky the burning of the syllabus, here we are the stranger for the duration, the visitor all aflame. Slow the breath and hold the day in place. Speed the sky beneath the thrall of earth and atmosphere, turn the page and make your mark, swallow the concoction as your blood sings along. Time comes when the count will go on without, the lonely at long last alone.

The daylight left. The gaze of the sky stuck in the minds eye, the sound of geese, the sound of crows. The gray eyes of the sky as it slips into its finery. The colors all collaborate as the night eases in close, the heat and the first kiss of cooling, the structures of the revealed. The world continues its creeps and crawls, the day all souvenirs and antecedents, the night the further aims of the arthropods. The night drags it out in brights and slows, the shadows sway in the passing headlights, the firmament held by sirens and little lights that dwindle away. History only real as it falls out of memory. The things that sing the softest after they turn to stone. 

These are the small concessions, the brutal editing and the sloppy pastes, the heat a halo of insects and irritations. This is where the lean and dash of the water becomes the river, the brimming bandwidth the shapes and skins. The night lays it down and somehow we are found. The strata of amped atmospheres, the layers of seeings and sayings, the code of the glimpse once caught then long gone. These words by the eyeful, words in your hands, the amplitudes unspoken. These pledges bent from these whisperings of escaping wind. These pledges that wait for the words to take shape. A flash and its gone. A flash and all is stone.