It’s been a while since it rained here last. The next one forecast is a chance on down the way. Cold and clouds and the waning moon is all my skies provide. The night and the ministry of memory, some old song and a dozen lives disappear, returning to the earthquake rattle of the window by your bed. A train, a trace, the draught of grace minus the trickle through the beard. Drink deep enough to drown the dreaming, smoke long enough to bend the memory to the will. The heater goes quiet and the house takes a chill. A heart full of things I can’t live down, and the long road down from the going wrong,
It early when the room closes in, crowded with song and smoke and mean old me. I’m crawling on the bottom, getting one breath of every three, beset with this burning ache from root to crown. The heart staggers though it’s bursting, a clumsy man beset with countless stairs and an unfortunate tumble, the sad provocation as it races to the basement. The shadows sift and soften at the beckon of the light, blue plumes and the shifting skins of screens in this amber elder pall. Dust and unsettled bones, a stirring in small circles. Tears and the portents of the coming storm.
It’s not even ten o’clock and the front door’s locked. Midnight still a skip and a hop off, and the gates are closed. The broken clock, hands always straight up at twelve, sells the same old lie without a tick or tock. The table is laden with books and dust, the ones I’m still reading to the ones I gave a rest. There are words I won’t manage to see, things I’ll never think to say. There are letters I am longing for and letters I never sent. Something I want to say to someone I never knew who’s long since gone. Something I want to hear that I wouldn’t believe if you swore on a stack of blues. Just a bunch of stuff I think I know from so long ago it may as well be a Bible story. Just a lot of words so heartfelt they might as well be from a song.
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