compromise

I buried the bones of midnight long ago, in the silky earth of easy words, in the simple grave of moving on. The gray ice sky held its place long after dawn had given its all, a chill tangle of mist hanging onto everything in sight. Everything held still, the fog enclosing each hour. Everything held tight, the day just slipping away. By the time the sun was gone, I was walking on the graves of that last midnight and the day that hardly said a word. I swallow a little more coffee, and spread the words out wide.

The lukewarm coffee tastes of bitter oil and flat salty ash. It slathers my tongue, greases my throat. I would shudder had I not shed that reflex by force of habit. Cold coffee and bitter measures much of my sustenance, the nausea and disgust barely make me blink. We live in the crossing of these vast distances between what we must and what we long for, checking each chore off these endless lists, waiting patiently for something that seems a glimmer of what we truly want. This awful cooling coffee just another compromise, happiness just a story remembered out of time from the telling.

There are no records to be read, no secrets to keep. The odd jangling grays, the bright birthless blues, the wings of birds and insects colliding with the light. There is no muse whispering, no romance pressing, no reason to deny or persuade. Just dumb motion, just the feathery insistence of the blood blessing this conspiracy of flesh. Written without a thought to reading, red only another color marking meals and wounds. These small burials, this fleeting shine.