open

 The crows break formation, their flight stretched across the sky, silhouettes flickering through the web of tree in player piano notation. Reading is a steady gig, remembering what it looks like when it means a thing, knowing what to look for in the scrawl. I like to think my book is open. I like to think I look like the little I seem. So I smoke beside the door. So I sleep with the window always open. This passing through and through.

You know it like there’s no one coming. You know it like the wound wet and fresh. The glistening beneath the fading sky. The weight of all this failing light. You know the way these words are going. You know enough to get the gist. It’s a letter between unlikelies. It’s the folly before the fall.

I can’t see I really see the season. The clock and the twilight, the cars with their headlights on. It’s not that I don’t believe them. It’s not that I resist. It is another artifact of culture, another set of etiquettes. The assumption that someone’s watching both hubris and acknowledging unseen eyes. I pass along these vague translations, a schoolboy mimicking the grammar of the spells. It relies on illumination and scant bandwidth, a story carried within your skin, the unwitnessed and yet known. It is the wings tilted towards the updraft, the time between the fire and the smoke.