doze

The afternoon just showed up, the day half hearted and indecisive about the overcast,  a flag planted in uncertain soil.  I sip black coffee, the steaming mirror on its surface full of trees and ripples. The hands stay unsteady, the ache just spreads. I am a camera, I am a box of magnets, I am the engine running down. The season blows some leaves around. I wish I was sleeping I say for something to say.

There’s really nothing much to me. I am the resilience of nowhere to go, I am the crime scene left in the long term parking. A map crisp and crumpled, the legend rattles as you unfold it. The long slow dissolve, the tyranny of the continuity, the tomb sifts us down to dust. The glacial pace now a flickering frame by frame, the film unspools as the seasons speed on by. A box of letters clutched tight, the mementos of a time when I was human. Now it is pain and days and dreaming, the abandoned calendar and the broken clock.

I ache and I hunger, I want and I whine. The words stopped coming, but I write them out just the same. Stacks and stacks of symbols, thick in ghosts and transitions, laid out on the picture of a page. Beasts and birds and the shabby flora. Smoke and sky and those persistent goodbyes. Abstracted beneath the river, the silt and stones, I am word and witness. I am picture and frame and the hole in the wall behind it. The season brittle, the earth pensive, the wonder that turns you to a pillar of salt. Across this desolation I am obliged. The dreaming speaking through my flesh, dozing in blood and bone.