Aldebaran

The heat lingers on the skin, long after the lights go down. Ambient fire trapped in atoms glutted with action, the effervescence of these fleeting mutations. Vultures rise on the updraft, measuring the exchange rate in the atmosphere. All the murdered darlings that gather upon the cutting room floor come home to roost. All the better angels, their work wasted as heat and light.

The things I swept away, the slaughtered hopes and erased progeny. The litany of indiscretions left bruising your dreams. The pages torn from the book just as it was about to get good. The evidence and the precious mementos altered in the scribbled genes. Fists and footfalls and the river of thirst. Dry bones to keep banging on the same old drum.

There is the color of your eyes and the color of that flower, the one that seems to just bloom there in your hair. There are the smoke signals beneath your thoughts, the margins full of scars and numbers. All the reasons that you cherish left in the woods to be raised by wolves. My burned flesh, your smoldering gaze, the secrets left hanging there up in the sky. The country of the hunt, long after the feast is finished.