all the dreams and wonders

I couldn't watch that last light paint silhouettes above the horizon line to the east. I couldn't stare as the moon lay fallow in the sprawl of bare limbs to the west. I lost north and south in the usual way, stumble and sway and the spun map bleeds colors I can not see. Night arises whatever my bearings. Lost or found, or run aground, I am grounded beside this easy grind. All the shapes and shadows that gather like the songs long ago lost in the murmuring of our hearts. All the dreams and wonders swept away in that sea of indifferent stars.

My mind dawdles, a river buried in a flow of dross and dreck. I never could remember all the things I was supposed to forget, so ghosts glow and simple stone light my way, lost between stars and things I should have said. How bright those teeth, how sharp that smile, how inevitable that bite. Skin broken in a ragged circle, two grins drawn by dull scalpels, cast in opposition upon my dusty flesh. I wouldn't bleed out the poison, or let the wound heal clean. So goes a life of letters, folded pages and pressed flowers. Hours left unsettled.

Ease me into this indistinction, leaven this wound with a press of earnest lips and the scent of flowers dying in the night. Leave me to settle into versions of metal, endings spelled out in steel and tungsten, in smoke and the loud retort of chemical thunder. Let the shadows drown out all the noise of mistaken hands and certain aim. Let the horizon slide away again and again, as I idly spell out oaths and epitaphs, my dry finger tracing each letter upon your empty belly as the moon glows bright and mad. The things I can not see released suddenly from their bindings, alive at last in different skins. These fevers and discontents settling into the herds destined head long for cliffs, words another pathogen looking for a host.