I was a lover

Hungry with nothing but a toothache to chew on, the night works its way into my lap. Something wrong with the body, the body language follows suit, leaning into one pain to avoid too much of another. It’s the sort of thing the animal knows, gut and limb and the untithed mind telling stories out of school. It’s the sort of thing the ghost will tell you if you get too reckless with the instrument. The flame may pass in inferno and in spark, jumping from vessel to vessel, abiding in the unyielding dark. The flame still burns in feckless ember and bright conceit, though the temple has long since burned down. 

A second cigar, the street gone dark, quiet for the night before garbage day. The same scene as the cold closes in, cold fingers and dimly lit screens, the ghost always closing in as the words seal the circle and the story goes again. The same complaints of blood and bone, of love unrequited and the same old song. The same refrain of memory and fantasy, lovers returned despite it all, a cloud for a cloak and sunflowers for a crown. Working the ember through the leaf, all my efforts to end in ash. The attendance of the station of the altar of the unseen.

We all live in some sort of story. I’m not saying I’m exempt, it’s just that my stories are part of a world that’s all but gone. It’s part of the natural order, the ending of a branching, the blooming of the new. It’s the other nature— not the stroll through the majesty and the mystery, but the pop gone weasel, the brutish tooth and claw. This senescence mirrors my uselessness, a young man’s skill set in a broken down old man, limits that I never expected to live long enough to meet. Only the wisdom of the fool that touched every fire twice, a busker’s patter and a juggler’s touch. An embarrassment of letters making claims the ass never had to cash, mistaking boredom and poor choices for the hand of fate, going all in despite the deal. The spaces left in a life left burning. Only assorted scorch marks and smoke spilling up the eaves.