work

The names won't stick to the stars, such old light and distant words. Just an assortment of ancient lights and spent stories. Just the flags of buried kingdoms, the barrows laden with swords and crowns. Look all you like, what you've seen is so long gone. Watch the skies, watch the road. Tell me you won't end up in the same place.

Cold water and some dissolved coda, the songs that seem so easily swallowed. Like the armor of bible verses, the timeless curses carved into the architecture, the analogies of death and rebirth that lend themselves to every heavy dawn. How heedlessly you have loved and battled. How careless every choice seemed, drained of the immediacy of consequence.

The day does its job, sending these heartfelt dreams into remission. All the made up jobs, all the patent medicine concerns built from this shared delusion. The songs on the radio, the celebrity apostasies of love and words and addiction. The made up crimes and the intimate betrayals, the daily labors of foolishness and deception. How lovely the vultures when they first spackle the sky with their deft silhouettes, leavening the dawn with their ease and their purpose. How honestly they skin the sky, knowing what the world is below.