show

It’s the hour of the wailing train, the hour of the seething night, the boys down the block drunk and singing corridos into the street. The words come despite the clock in my lap and the eye on the phone, the hours all old and alone, walking around in the yoke of habit bitching about the ritual. Books and hand me downs and talismans. The dust that sticks to the bright glass lamp, the dust that spills and ascends, legions of jellies and the cycles of sun and star. The far away now what you are, drowning at the speed of time, haunting the hallways of my hidden heart. All these open secrets no one ever bothers to know.

I take another tectonic breath, the song slips and my spine sighs, the light the glow of an uncomfortable alone. The sagging refurbished surrendered flesh wheezing away at the bellows, the bones the tall timbers as the wind fills the sails. Part art, part heart, part patter and misdirect the words come loose as I run out the clock. The songs tumble, engines sneer, the dog licks at a sore toe. Ozymandias calling from inside the ruined statue, the delusions and hyperbole baked right in, the long winded alibi and the fount of the eternal tongue. Between labyrinths and trying not to loom. 

I guess I tell it in stacks and treasures, the dusty shelves laden with relics and tomes, the toys and mementos and items of arcane power. I guess I tell it in the shambles that I share. This weight and heat the words wear within you, the meter of the reading, the tremble in your flesh. The days burned like evidence of a felony, the name turned and turned until it only makes you hurt, bleeding out in shame and pain and jags of hot regret. The nights the long halls and darkened rooms of the farther and farther along. Long ago I went to see a show, and I never made it back. The shadow and the say so waiting for the word.