ball of wax

It’s not so much that the sun is setting, it’s that it’s leaning hard towards the west. It’s not so much the world is turning, it’s that the dice keep tumbling on. I go numb past certain notions, abstractions of peace and wise living, I lose touch with the loss of touch. I know the cruel of the moment by my bones and peculiars, I know the blessings by the hull of the tide washed wreck. The dogs on patrol, the sun in my eyes, my cold fingers and the nothing much to touch. Words from wherever the words were left on. The blind bright in my left eye, black wings writing down the particulars, the call sharp and direct. 

The cold speaks through my bones, it plays them like some artless instrument, like a poor bow to a saw blade. The untuned breath a particular caught fire, the way some consequences release, in skips and spasms and momentary revelations. The sparrow chatter and low road hungers, the repetition and the rhyme. These moments of rough wing warming, these saga of hitch and hew, the sky a drift a color a loss. The days mob up, passing with the speed of sky, passing cup to cup.

The words are there when I wake in the morning. The words are there as I drag through each day. The clock beset with the chase of the same old numbers, the page is made of myth and math, this ache and the dreams of blood. Nothing but the breath and burn and bodies unburied. The stones and the stacks and the no going back. Hands filled with fifth business and busywork, the lighter, the phone, the pen. Hands empty but for the reaching. The days just the dragging from place to place.