toil

Days of rain and soon so much water conspires with all manner of remembering. Languid nights and brutal wanderings, from warm embrace to bone chilling lonesome, every feeling is loosed amid all this green and gray and ways lost. Those electric first kisses that feel so distant the may as well be myths, stories told about how the world was born so familiar, so livid in the blood. Those hard defeats and fateful lapses that explain so many scars and wounds. The rain falls and pools. I pause, mortal and alive.

Worms writhe, drowning on the slick pavement. The gutters spatter and plume. Cars drive past, bright and quick and fuming, their ersatz fury only a momentary stirring of the surface of this abiding tide. I smoke and stare, another ragged aspect of this momentous disarray. The sky is a lesson in fluidics, everything aloft and adrift. The rain comes in fits and sighs, unmoved by bounty or hardship. However wrecked or broken, the world is always working on something.

My beard is tangled, my fingers cold. Every inch of me smells of smoke. I seem a survivor of some terrible conflagration in my dull indolence, some ragged refugee arisen from some fresh assault. Some soul having endured something much worse than an unrelenting self. I fill in the blank spaces with all these flattened out words, reckoning direction from tailing of smoldering ash and the latest whim of the wind. I follow the words as they trail down the page, all reason escaping into the gray traces. All meaning an afterthought as the world toils away.