goddamn lonely love

You wake to find the streets painted with the moon's strange brushwork, everything shockingly vivid and submerged still in the fabric of dreaming. The feathery weight of moon shadows cast in opposition to the closing dawn, you move gently, as if trying not to wake the world. You smile slowly at your usual suspects, the strays and newspapers, the harried glares of all the hapless stragglers and their handshake drugs. Your mouth is crowded with mercies rather than epitaphs, with benediction rather that cold shiny murder. It won't last, but there's the charm. The most enduring loveliness is always temporary.

The ordinary has its distinguishing features, the orders of favors, the flavor of the air, the odd concoctions the unravelled mind creates amid memory, plot, and sensation. So it is the chirring of the starlings, the busywork of sparrows and finches, the scheming of the scrub jays, the complaint of the hummingbird somehow indignant at your stubborn plodding existence. The dawn is pine tar and dry needles and the sound of a rake scratching out its labors. It is the washed out moon malingering heavily in the west, and the ashtray feeling of some small pleasure wished for and remembered but somehow out of reach. The star-struck promise of the curbside kiss, waking to coffee brewing, the headstrong song of the coming dusk.

The week that passed had its births and its doses, its indulgences and plenitudes. Lost in constellations until they give way to storms, lost in the scuttling clouds until they are upstaged by the virtuosity of flocks, watching wings glaze errant winds in planes and angles until the street spits out its scuff shoed children and the bitter traffic of the workaday world. The blood splits and schisms, spreading these needless genes out a little wider, the squalling child a limited blessing and a cumulative curse. You keep your artless vigil, watching over the brash strays and fresh graves. Then this too passes, and you are yet another someone, in a world as odd and familiar as any dream.