obsolescence

I am less than the song stuck in your head, always on the edge of slipping away. I am further than the brickwork beneath the dusty mantle, full of trophies and memories. Written in the gaps, the apertures adjusting for the waning day, the doors locking against the unknown night. I am captured in the flash bulb and the rear view mirror, locked in odd documentation and circumstantial evidence. This map work of bruises, the strange turn gentle must make to wrest the works of the brutal from lost souls. These kisses cleaved from all but the most hopeless dreams of love.

I swallow the fire, I breathe out smoke. The wind has its way with it all. I am the insistence of measurement, the rapture of the prize unclaimed. More than that mixture of ghost and blood, more than the fever dreams and wasteful eyes that stare and stare. Wings clipped, horns ground down to mere longings, I pace and I stagger. I watch my mind make mistakes from the constellations. I watch as all the lights go down.

There is a beauty that is beside us. There is a temper that makes the soul of the autumn reeds stronger than steel. I am a muddle of longing and slipped tongues, the busy work of hands that will not keep to themselves. All these hungers and petty alarms, all the waste of will and want. The night is a tide that is always rising, the day the droll ravenings of the sun stuck beach. There is an ache that comes of the world working fine without. There is a relief bound to becoming obsolete. These wind swept vacancies, these star crowded crowns.