the girl from no tomorrow

She walks as if she was keeping time, some music that exists to measure the sway of her hips, some dance that is always about to begin. She walks indifferent to the gray world painted on around her, that color of ice that clings to the slippery sky. Catching eyes and trailing that native promise, flesh singing despite the inconvenience of the season. The chill in the air only contrast to her enduring warmth, a passion play pressed so thoroughly into her ordinary clay. The steam she spills following her like the cold shadows that reach and reach.

The earth has been left to its leanings, the days clipped and brief at best. The trees are settling into their winter skins, the fall running bright and blue despite the cold. People leave their markers in the detritus and the skies. She moves, a song and singer woven into the usual limitations. She moves, every promise ever made and lost to chance. At best, I am a witness to the bend and ache of the world weighing evidence. At best, I am inscribing the spell as its magic is cast into the gutters. The words and the weather the only measure I can make of the time.

I am swaddled in the husk of empty habit. I am cloistered in smoke and the endurance of the flame. Coils of breath, ruined and rising. Clouds of exhaust, caught in the trembling touch of the icy air. The songs cross bridges that were best left idle. The music that leaves us stuck with mysteries and aimless want. She trails some hint of spring, some cusp of summer. That certainty made of green and blue, where tomorrow begins again anew. I abide the hour, and I hold no judgement towards the faith required. Another day, some other chance that life will arrive again. She moves into another nation, blending the forgotten with that ache for forgiveness that eludes me always. Some promise kept to that world without me where I continue to eke out some shallow living. Some truth that evades the heretic counting the wings in the sky and the colors he could never name.