indifferent

The words won't wait for the wizened tongue, the moment always about to dissolve into sweet and bitter, the day already half remembered wrong. Something said, something put away for later, always the tabled topic and that elephant in the room. The curtains sink and billow, the air so still and dense. The favored ones all seasoned with shadow and distance, fondness drawn long, burning ignorance and wishes as one. The sickness is the tale and the tide. Everything either choked down or spilling out at once.

The flesh quivers and goes damp, some unsettled shock feathering through these indifferent levels of life. Sweat beading on a cool forehead, the room somehow swimming despite the still and the dry of the air. Each breath goes beating through the blood, each heart-beat the lock step of this inevitable peeling away. It is the little things that add up to the impossible. It is the tiny distinctions that obliterate all sense.

The tired poems and the lipstick traces, the wilting blossoms and the faded favors. The lonely walls and the distant constellations. All the wanting and the waiting blending with the wide open empty, all the feel and fever spent on the hole in the sky. Wishes made on meteors, promises made to the imaginary and the dead. A whole romance of contingent phrases left in the box. These distinctions of composite improbables all gathered on the line, reminding me of all the reasons some things are only make-believe. For once in agreement with the world, all of us wanting you mostly in vain.