the odds at even

The hours are running out, the hour’s getting long in the tooth, the way it always seems watching time just smile. The crowded atmosphere and the blue bias light, a cough that presumes too much, another object in motion trailing smoke and dust. The old songs play away on some gizmo, the heart another hard scrabble gadget, fuming away in some lonely room remembering when you were beautiful. Dawdling with the screen door open, aching down to the architecture, sinning through the antecedents. You smoke in the raw outrage of the moon coming on. You smoke in the style of lone men in cheap rooms. Even stillness thick with menace. 

The tv is the radio, the radio just the shuffling of the songs. The ashtray fills with offerings to Ganesha and apportionments for ghosts, the embers livid with intent. The bottle baby cat is taking up the ottoman, the pit bull coughing from the couch, the night dishes it out quick. Glued to the routine of tapping out line after line, queued up and raring by the clock. This oblique circus, the weave of memory and sensation and myth, this smudge of wonder across these bleak empiricals. This worry of waves and miracles, the story of the moon pieced together from puddles and magazines. Feet flat and slouched low, I am a marvel of met atmosphere, a star fallen trailing smoke.

Tonight, it’s all flashes of ramparts, it’s all tattered banners and rambling anthems. Flash cards and stop sign stickers, worn through fantasies and the demands of the animal. The train wails, the world rattles on with the fun all gone, the stranger shuffling along his beat. Here at the trailheads of the wanton probabilities, the easy chair full of flashing teeth and dog fight proclamations, we bear the weight of the radiance. Revelation where the grace clamps down, the meat in the moment, the skin in the game. Again, these words again. Cut outs from old magazines. The puddles left over from the last rain. Toss a coin, the story will take it from there.