later

It always was an island of no return, where lost souls without hope would set their baleful gaze. It was always a locked box meant to repel secrets. One day becomes another, this fool's reach spills into the wide horizon. Egrets above rice paddies seen from a road suspended in the sky. A crying child too sick to know he's dead.

The water is too still to touch, as if the least ripple would unleash the waiting depths, as if the very stillness is proof there is something to fear. The clouds drift on like the cries of a wounded animal, weak and plaintive and completely defeated. That stone that will sink so deep that it will join the song of shadows. The sunken certainty that there will again be light.

I feel it in the dismal constraints of flesh and bone, the dulled aches, the sharpened pains, the sense that loss is all that is left. I sort through mail, knowing only that when it comes to money, there is never enough. Debt and plea and ordinary devastation. Sleep waiting somewhere in another room. Sleep stripped down, waiting with its eyes open wide.