always

The dusk comes soft and slow, all hat in hands and temple manners. Always it goes, gentle with its touch, shy about the center until every exit is covered. Then it takes cover and unfurls it’s standard, the herald of the coming night, swinging from every branch clinging to every eaves. I keep my own counsel, the steady curl of smoke, the field of ash below the unblinking ember. A trail finder and a fire starter, with little fealty save to coyote and crow. Always night arrives with neither reckoning or road. Always the wings of mosquitoes and the beckoning moon.

And so it is with this aching aperture. So it goes with these rounding downs and adding ups, the lush curves gravid through the restraints of reaching limbs, the moon bright and beaming through sky and branch. I smoke what little I have swindled, I smoke what I am offered. The portions I pass around, the portion I am too keen to keep. The stars brightly fixed to the firmament, their shimmering light among the most ancient oaths, granting wishes and making maps. The moon letting loose another torrent of dreams.

Here I go, always outnumbered. Here I go, skins drawn from the storm of words that always swarm about me. There is a song at play, the music in your memory, the singer behind your eyes. I sit here as the streets start their sniffing, I sit here as another freight train thunders and wails. I feed the ashtray as the traffic coalesces and the story lets go. I keep the fire going as the night swallows everything whole, an ember flickering below the weight of the becoming moon. A waste of space, a waste of words. Above and below, and on and on. Each moment met leaving unencumbered, each word a stranger at my table.